{"id":5704,"date":"2013-05-27T18:12:21","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T23:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/?p=5704"},"modified":"2022-03-21T15:01:09","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T20:01:09","slug":"the-care-and-feeding-of-your-microbiome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/27\/the-care-and-feeding-of-your-microbiome","title":{"rendered":"The Care and Feeding of Your Microbiome"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you read the history of alternative medicine in the US, you\u2019ll be as intrigued as I was by its preoccupation with your gastrointestinal system and feces. Diet, digestion, absorption, elimination, and possessing a wondrous \u201cinner hygiene\u201d were recurring themes originating in the late 19th<\/sup> century, when Kellogg\u2019s cereals were the mainstay health food at Michigan\u2019s Battle Creek Sanitarium, best eaten in conjunction with your daily enema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because these topics were favored by alternative physicians such as chiropractors, naturopaths, and colon therapists, they were deliberately ignored or regarded with actual hostility by conventionally trained physicians. I well remember the chief of medicine calling me into his office when he learned I was opening an integrative center and snarling something like, \u201cSo now you\u2019re going to be one of those colon-cleaning candida quacks,\u201d his alliteration not as poetic as my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though I\u2019d been an internist for 20 years before opening WholeHealth Chicago, I readily acknowledged I\u2019d never come across such diagnoses as intestinal dysbiosis (intestinal bacterial imbalance), leaky gut syndrome (intestinal hyperpermeability), food sensitivities as opposed to food allergies, or chronic diseases caused by apparently harmless parasites like blastocystis and candida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor did I know that chiropractors and naturopaths had for years routinely ordered tests measuring the efficiency of the digestive system from a lab I\u2019d also never heard of, called Great Smokies Diagnostic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I speedily filled in what I considered a serious gap in my education, I kept wondering why these topics were simply never mentioned in medical school or residency. Conversations about this with gastroenterologist friends were really disappointing. Their ignorance seemed both willful and deliberate, as if it would be embarrassing to have some shared expertise in a field a chiropractor also knew. They\u2019re still my friends, but, sadly, they\u2019re still clueless. Young physicians just out of training stare at you blankly if you say \u201cleaky gut\u201d or \u201cdysbiosis,\u201d though by now just about everyone in conventional medicine finally agrees that taking probiotics after antibiotics probably can\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on the numbers, you are 10% human, 90% bacteria <\/b><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Maybe if all of them perused the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, they\u2019d have an attitude change. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs<\/a> by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma<\/i> and other titles) is an elegant article on our internal microbiome<\/a>, that intestinal array of the several hundred microbial species whose population is currently pegged at about 100 trillion and, weighing in at about two pounds, exceeds the total number of cells in your very own body by a factor of ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the Pollan piece (virtually predicted by chiropractors and naturopaths throughout the 20th<\/sup> century) to better grasp these ideas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n