Blog

4 Key Strategies to Help Restore the Gut Barrier and Relieve Inflammation

Discover four key strategies to heal and protect your patients' gut barrier integrity using vitamin D, glutamine, Chinese skullcap and bee propolis.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | August 30, 2023

Gastrointestinal Health

4 Unique Advantages of Spore-Based Probiotics

Growing research shows spore-forming bacteria have unique advantages for your patients who need gut health support, including those with SIBO. Some of these benefits of spore-based probiotics are increased stability, longer survivability, concentrated action, and targeted impacts in the GI tract.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | June 28, 2023

Gastrointestinal Health

Why Your Detox Protocol Needs a Broad-Spectrum Binder

Your patients need your help to stop the harsh cycle of toxin recirculation. By incorporating a comprehensive detox protocol that includes these two broad-spectrum binders, you can remove a wider variety of toxins and help your patients feel better faster.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | April 19, 2023

Gastrointestinal Health

Tips for Supporting Elimination Pathways

How many of your patients have tried a detox that just didn’t work out as well as they planned? If they stuck to the protocol but felt worse than when they started, we have tips for supporting their elimination pathways and Phase 3 detoxification.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | April 12, 2023

Gastrointestinal Health

An Emerging Clinical Conundrum: Patients with "Resistant"-Type Microbiome Patterns

Functional medicine practitioners who prescribe probiotics need to consider some recent findings regarding their patients’ colonization patterns.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | February 8, 2023

Gastrointestinal Health

8 Best Practices for Healthy Detoxification

In this follow-up post to last week's blog on supporting Phase I and Phase II liver detoxification, we're going over the important considerations when creating a detox treatment plan for your patients.

Vincent Pedre, MD | December 28, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Foods and nutrients for liver detoxification

Gastrointestinal Health

Detox or Die: How to Help Your Patients Detoxify in a Modern World

Detoxification is a multi-step process that occurs in multiple organ systems but especially in the liver. Support your patients' liver detoxification pathways and hormone balance with these foods and nutrients.

Vincent Pedre, MD | December 21, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Berberine Offers Multifaceted Benefits for Your Patients

Berberine is typically recognized for its antimicrobial or antifungal properties, but may better be considered a “microbial modulator” because of the distinctive relationship it has between the microbiome and overall metabolic health.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | December 7, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

4 Consequences of Stress on Gut Health & Tips for Repair

Although stress is ubiquitous, there are ways to guide patients in managing it, including how it impacts their gut health.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | November 2, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

PPI Overuse and Nutrient Depletion: Give Your Patients the Support They Need

PPIs are among the most widely prescribed drugs worldwide and are seldom used judiciously for short-term treatment. Instead, patients are often placed on PPIs indefinitely without regard for the long-term consequences.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | October 19, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Gastrointestinal Health

Polyphenols: The New Prebiotic Frontier

Prebiotics are nutrients that induce the growth or activity of beneficial bacteria in the gut. Prebiotic fibers induce microbial fermentation in the distal small bowel and large intestine.

Vincent Pedre, MD | July 11, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Gastrointestinal Health

Dairy Sensitivities and Intolerances: Using the Right Digestive Enzymes

Patients with IBS or IBD often have a dairy intolerance, sensitivity or combination of both. An effective dairy enzyme blend is a great adjunct to the care to help patients manage uncomfortable GI symptoms associated with dairy intolerance and sensitivity.

Vincent Pedre, MD | May 2, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Gastrointestinal Health

Key Considerations for Rotating Probiotics

The microbiome is a complex ecosystem in which a diversity of species is required for a healthy GI environment.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | April 4, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

GERD: Weighing the Benefits and Risks of Treatment Options

Take a moment to reflect how many of your patients experience heartburn or prolonged coughing. More than likely, it may be too many to count. And chances are if these patients are experiencing symptoms more than a couple times a week...

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | February 14, 2022

Gastrointestinal Health

Protection Your Patients Need for the Holidays: Effective Approaches to Neutralize Gluten

As the holiday season approaches, eating patterns are often unpredictable. Whether it is eating out at a restaurant or going over to a family member's house for dinner, unexpected foods may present themselves at unexpected times. Sure, your patients can be educated to identify and dodge problem foods that provide digestive troubles. Yet it is often overlooked how "safer" foods are prepared.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | April 16, 2021

Gastrointestinal Health

Novel Therapeutics to Help Soothe and Strengthen the Gut Epithelium

Back-to-school season is here and both teachers and students are exposed to bugs, toxins and other antigens that may work their way into the GI tract and cause health woes. Alongside reinforcing healthy lifestyle habits, we as practitioners are compelled to offer the most comprehensive protection to our patients, which includes supporting a healthy gut epithelium.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | December 16, 2020

Gastrointestinal Health

The What, When and Why of Using Probiotics as Targeted Therapies

For any practitioner who uses probiotics in their practice, there isn't a clear-cut guide on the what, when and why of using probiotics for different conditions. Worldwide, over-the-counter consumption of probiotic supplements has increased in recent years. Notwithstanding, clinical studies for many probiotic strains and formulations have had conflicting results. New stool testing modalities, like 16s-RNA PCR and whole-genome sequencing, have helped assess gut colonization by probiotics, strain-level activity, interactions with resident flora, effects on the host, and the potential useful medical indications of specific strains. Regardless, trying to design test-guided probiotic formulations based on shot-gun sequencing of a stool specimen is still not exact science, as I have seen in patients who have tried customized probiotics through companies, like Sun Genomics, not achieve the intended results one would expect through "customization."

Vincent Pedre, MD | November 16, 2019

Gastrointestinal Health

The Complex Relationship Between IBS and SIBO

The symptoms of SIBO (e.g., bloating, abdominal distension/ pain/discomfort, diarrhea, fatigue, weakness, etc.) overlap considerably with those of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and many clinicians consider these conditions to be commonly associated. However, epidemiological research shows that the relationship between the two conditions is not well understood, is controversial, and varies considerably depending upon the diagnostic criteria used to define SIBO (and IBS). In fact, the large variance in the frequency of SIBO in IBS subjects mirrors that found in healthy controls.

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | July 16, 2019

Gastrointestinal Health

Implications of Cytolethal Distending Toxins Bring New Perspective for Natural SIBO Treatment

For the functional medicine practitioner, it is not a rare occurrence when a patient presents to your office with uncomfortable gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhea and/or constipation. These are common complaints that present across most GI cases. But what happens when the patient doesn't show improvement, and even small diet changes still present with gas, bloating, diarrhea and food intolerances? Patients like these are frustrating, especially if you have tried numerous approaches, like an elimination diet, with unsuccessful results, and you cannot pinpoint the cause of their symptoms. If this is the case, you may want to consider small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).

Vincent Pedre, MD | April 16, 2019

Gastrointestinal Health

Treatment Strategies to Support Patients with Low Gut Motility

Many functional integrative medicine practitioners would agree that a fundamental principal of their practice is to pinpoint the root cause of dysfunction in order to truly help patients. Yet, this is not always easy to do, and some patients can be more frustrating than others. Such is true for patients with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), especially if numerous approaches to remove unwanted bacteria in the small intestine provide unsuccessful results.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | March 16, 2019

Gastrointestinal Health

How to Make Spore-Forming Probiotics a Successful Part of Your SIBO Treatment Protocol

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) is a rising area of focus in functional medicine. As microorganism levels in the small intestine increase, so does microbial activity, like fermentation. With these type of patients in practice, you may have seen that even healthy diets can cause gas, bloating, and intolerance to certain foods and probiotics. Such gastrointestinal complaints have been attributed to sensitivity, but the reason may be microbial imbalance in the small intestinal environment. As you know, the health of the gut relies on a balanced microbiota. Spore-forming probiotics can contribute to that balance by having a positive influence specifically in the small intestine, promoting organism diversity and immune protection.

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | June 16, 2018

Gastrointestinal Health

Improve Patients' Quality of Life with Lifestyle Interventions for IBS

Almost everyone experiences these symptoms at some point. But when they are a daily reality, these symptoms become a significant burden in patients' lives. Patients often feel isolated and limited in their day-to-day activities; they don't know where to turn. As practitioners, we must try to understand the frustration these patients are experiencing and recognize that our expertise in pinpointing the root cause of symptoms will be the key to helping these patients. Examples like these are classic cases of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Joseph Ornelas, PhD, DC | May 16, 2018

Gastrointestinal Health

Benefits of Spore-Forming Probiotics

In the past two decades, there have been few areas of research that have expanded as greatly as that which explores the importance of the human microbiome(s), especially the nuanced relationship between the bacteria in the GI tract and their human host. It is not uncommon to see papers published, weekly, showing the potential connection between metabolic activity within the gut microbiome and some important human pathophysiology.

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | October 16, 2017

Gastrointestinal Health

The Emergence of Autoinflammatory Syndromes

Most clinicians are familiar with autoimmune disease mechanisms. Typically, these define situations where effectors within the adaptive immune system (i.e., immunoglobulins or T-cell receptors) bind inappropriately to...

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | October 16, 2017

Gastrointestinal Health

19 Great Ideas from Simplexity Medicine 2.0: Quantifying Patient Resilience

On July 9, 2020, the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute, in collaboration with Ortho Molecular Products, convened hundreds of healthcare practitioners to Simplexity Medicine 2.0: Quantifying Patient Resilience. The virtual, live conference was a great opportunity for functional medicine practitioners, as it helped them connect and learn from a faculty of experts sharing their insight on building and measuring health resiliency. In the climate of COVID-19, this topic was timely and valuable to healthcare practitioners seeing patients on the front lines of the pandemic. Attendees also learned about ways to continue transitioning their practices to meet the needs of patients during the pandemic, including telemedicine and group visits.

Olivia Morrissey | May 16, 2017

Gastrointestinal Health

The 3 I's of Building a Strong Gut-Immune Axis

In practice, it can be a challenge to break down complex medical concepts and articulate them simply to our patients. This is especially true when we begin to talk about the connection between gut and immune function. In the world of functional medicine, we find our patients to be a lot more engaged and wanting to learn these complex concepts in a more digestible way. And so, to provide quality information in smaller bites, I often speak about the 3 I's of building gut-immune health as a way to understand the importance of the types of nutrients we use together in order to enhance this synergistic relationship After all, 70% of our immune system is found within the digestive tract. In this post, I will lay out the 3 I's and include corresponding solutions to glue it all together.

Vincent Pedre, MD | February 16, 2017

Gastrointestinal Health

Simplifying SIBO: Case Study + Treatment Plan

You have a new patient coming in to see you. As you peruse her intake forms, you see she has already been treated for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (or SIBO, for short) several times, and she comes in complaining of recurring symptoms.

Vincent Pedre, MD | October 16, 2014

Gastrointestinal Health

Treat the Patient, Not the Disease: Advancing the Patient-Centered, Functional Medicine Approach to GI Dysfunction

When it comes to functional medicine, no other organ system exemplifies this patient-centered approach better than the gastrointestinal system.

Vincent Pedre, MD | February 16, 2014

Gastrointestinal Health

Setting Successful Treatment Expectations for Your Patients in the New Year

You've created an amazing A-Z plan for your patient. You're excited to apply all your functional medicine knowledge. They walk out the door with pamphlets, instructions, and a bag of supplements you're sure will alter the course of their chronic illness. The patient gets home and realizes, "Oh, oh...I can't do all this!" Two to four weeks later at follow-up, the patient tells you they only did one or two things on the list of 10 perfectly planned interventions for their condition. You feel like you failed, but really, you set your patient up for failure.

Vincent Pedre, MD | March 16, 2013

Gastrointestinal Health

The Challenges and Pitfalls of PPI Withdrawal

Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are among the most widely prescribed drugs worldwide, accounting for a profit in the billions for the pharmaceutical industry. They are the leading Western treatment for GERD, dyspepsia, and peptic ulcer disease. But the problem is that PPIs are not used judiciously for the short-term, such as healing a gastric ulcer; instead, patients are prescribed PPIs, then kept on them indefinitely without regard to the long-term potential harm of these medications.

Vincent Pedre, MD | January 16, 2013

Gastrointestinal Health

Managing the Exposome

Two related fields of study, both owing to the emerging science of genetics and genomics, are beginning to help us discover the role toxins play in human health and disease. The first is toxicogenetics, which describes how the genetic differences between certain individuals allow for varying susceptibility to different toxins. Since there are hundreds of different enzymes involved in our detoxification pathways, many individuals carry gene variants (polymorphisms) that allow for more efficient conversion and removal of toxins than others. Those individuals with slower detoxification pathways for a given toxin will show signs of toxicity at much lower doses than those with normal detoxification capacity. These differences often complicate "cause-and-effect" studies in large populations that carry over into the clinic. That is, just because a large epidemiological trial does not find a statistically significant relationship between exposure to a particular toxin and a particular health outcome (the average of all genetic variants), does not mean that such a relationship does not exist in the genetically-susceptible patient. Read more

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | December 16, 2011

Gastrointestinal Health

Dysbiosis or Adaptation: How Stable is the Gut Microbiome?

One of the greatest paradigm shifts in medicine over the past few decades has been the unfolding discoveries revealing the metabolic influence of the human microbiome, especially that which resides within the gastrointestinal tract. Indeed, it is difficult to find a medical discipline that is not actively investigating the potential role played by the gut microbiome in human health and disease. Read more

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | February 16, 2011

Gastrointestinal Health

Canary in the Coal Mine: AMD and the Lifestyle Synergy Model

Since doing my initial research for The Original Prescription, in which I discuss the benefits of lifestyle synergy, I keep running into more and more data confirming the overall health benefit of multiple "signals" coming from a variety of lifestyle decisions. Read more

Thomas G. Guilliams, PhD | June 16, 2010

Gastrointestinal Health

Mind-Altering Microbes: How your gut microbiome may influence your mood

While we have certainly heard that appetite and digestion are controlled by the enteric nervous system (also known as "the master control panel in your gut"), who would've thought that the gut might also control your emotions and mood? It's no wonder the old sayings, like "I've got a gut feeling about this," "That movie was gut-wrenching, " or "Come on, gut it out!" ring so true. In fact I'd venture to say when we are trusting our intuition we associate it with having a "gut feeling" about something. Read more.

Jill Carnahan, MD | December 16, 2009

Gastrointestinal Health

Managing a Stressed Practice

The term "stress," as it is currently used, was coined by Hans Selye in 1936 who defined it as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change." Selye's theories attracted considerable attention in basic medical sciences; however, stress soon became a popular buzzword that completely ignored Selye's original definition, even until today. Some people used the word to describe a known unpleasant trigger or situation to which they were subjected. For others, stress was their reaction to this in the form of physical or emotional symptoms. Read more.

Shilpa P. Saxena, MD, IFMCP | November 16, 2009