Understanding Your Gut Microbiome | with Dr Sinclair Bode

How can I ease my anxiety and depression? A question many of us find ourselves pondering when we have reached a place where we cannot seem to get relief. Maybe medication is not working for you, maybe your immune system, mood and behaviours are effected from your illness.

So, when all is lost, how can we support our bodies holistically?

Dr Sinclair Bode (MBBS, FACNEM) has focused his practice on integrative medicine allowing him to take new patients and to help more families confronted with complex medical problems. Not only has Dr Bode been an integral part in helping people heal from complex medical problems, but he contributed to Mahalia's recovery from depression and anxiety disorder.

If you are seeking natural remedies for depression and want to understand your gut microbiome, if you want to feel good about your health and ease anxiety with natural remedies, this episode opens up the conversation on ways we can look deeper holistically. This episode is all about bringing awareness to how making small adjustments to our health can improve our mental wellbeing and overall complex issues.

Dr Bode graduated from medicine at Adelaide University in 1986. He worked at the Flinders Medical Centre as an intern and RMO, before beginning a 3-month country rotation as a GP trainee in Broken Hill. Dr Bode fell in love with the area and continued to work at the Broken Hill Hospital as a registrar for several years in the Emergency, paediatrics and ICU / CCU departments and with the Royal Australian Flying Doctors Service. Returning to Adelaide, Dr Bode benefited from working in several practices, gaining invaluable experience and cementing his commitment to general practice.  In the 1990s, Dr Bode began doing a lot of work in the area of cancer and palliative care. A program on Euthanasia, featuring one of his patients, made him aware of an underlying desire to provide patients access to information and treatments, otherwise unavailable to them.

He was introduced to Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 1997 and this change in direction enabled him to further increase his repertoire of tools, to aid in the treatment of a variety of complex conditions. Dr Bode became actively involved with the Australian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine working on the board, in education and on the fellowship committees. Dr Bode has also been actively involved with Autism SA, Cancer Care Centre and in training with ‘Bio balance’, a group whose approaches aim to improve the health of people with various neuropsychiatric ailments including autism, depression and schizophrenia. Dr Bode has lectured for ACNEM, Mindd, Cancer Care Centre, Chronic fatigue association and Autism SA. He has worked as a Director, an Integrative General Practitioner in the Adelaide Hills location of Stirling for many years.

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Disclaimer: These episodes are for educational purposes. If you are seeking medical attention, please contact your doctor or for urgent mental health matters, please call LifeLine on 13 11 14

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Mahalia Jane, Dr Sinclair Bode

Dr Sinclair Bode  00:00

If you are depressed, and you respond to a drug like Prozac, then the question is Why aren't you making enough of your own serotonin or why are you not responding to it? 

Mahalia  00:09

And that's the short preview of what's coming up on today's episode. 

Mahalia  00:15

Hi, welcome to The Uncovery podcast. I'm your host, Mahalia Jane. Every episode I take you on a journey, talking about life, wellbeing, and mental healing. The uncovering connects with different people from different places who share stories of growth and enlightenment. It's my passion and privilege to be here guiding you with my own truth and experiences because it is possible to live in a beautiful state. 

Mahalia  00:52

On today's episode, I welcome Dr. Sinclair Bodie, who is an all-round amazing human being. Not only has he contributed to many people's lives, looking at alternative ways that we can heal Dr. Sinclair Bode was actually in fact, the general practitioner who really helped me and contributed to my recovery with my anxiety, disorder, and depression. And while some of the information may be relevant to you today, not all of this information should be taken as a medical appointment. And I encourage you to seek medical or specialist attention if you do need it. Now, before I start this episode, I would just like to highlight when I rubbed up to do this interview with Sinclair, my second microphone broke, and I did not want to take up much of his time, so I had to keep it quite short. And I was recording through one microphone, but still a great interview, and I still was able to pick up his voice and my voice through one microphone.

Dr Sinclair Bode  01:50

Yeah, hi, my name is Sinclair Bodie. I'm a general practitioner. I've been working for 33 years, since graduating as a medeco. I spent the first few years working in the hospital system. Before going to Broken Hill as part of a GP training. I was supposed to be there for three months in a public hospital setting but got caught there for three years. All of that was good and is sort of in the mid 90s. When I was back in Adelaide, I became more aware of the fact that there were things that I couldn't deal with as a doctor that wasn't being dealt with by other specialists, which is the usual model. And people were coming back to me and they were getting answers, seeing allied practitioners. And so I became interested in thinking outside of the square, you know, doing acupuncture and Chinese medicine, hypnotherapy, and eventually nutritional medicine, which gave me a way of thinking about the biochemistry of how the body worked. So if you are depressed, and you respond to a neurotransmitter, sorry, you respond to a drug like Prozac. And the question is, why aren't you making enough of your own serotonin? or Why are you not responding to it. And if you understand what serotonin is made from, and that is an amino acid called tryptophan is converted firefighters into defence. If you understand the cofactors, that are important to those enzyme processes, then it gives you tools to find another way of helping people but also avoiding some of the side effects and complications that you get when you prescribe drugs. So I guess that is what took me on this path.

Mahalia  03:41

I love it. And that's what actually brought me to your office, I was on four different types of vacation, I think. And I was feeling the worst I've ever felt in my life. So that's something that I had never thought of is looking at all of the things inside of me that make up who I am

Dr Sinclair Bode  04:00

you know, what's your diet Like? How's your gut working? Are you able to absorb those nutrients? Are there blocks on your ability to be able to use them? Do you have pathways that are not working? Because of deficiencies or toxicities or genetic reasons? And how do we get them working? If we can?

Mahalia  04:21

So is your approach with people that present with if we're just focused on someone who's presenting in a position similar to mice, my story and me, it's really unstable in terms of their mental health. Is your approach quite similar? Or do you? Do you judge it differently on their history or how they're presenting 

Dr Sinclair Bode  04:40

You take all of that into consideration. So it's not just one blanket approach that fits everything that's lazy. And I'd argue that that's selling short the skills that I've acquired as a general practitioner. So, you know, I'll deal with a diversity of issues, you know, A lot of them have complex behavioural problems, and particularly in kids with autism that are very damaged. You know, restlessness, the candidate is still they've been on lots of different medications that work imperfectly, and sometimes not well, how do I then make a difference to that child and that family so that a child that is very dysfunctional in a family, which is generally very dysfunctional as a result? How do you get the best out of that situation? And sometimes you find that the medications are part of the problem. And if you think differently, you can find other ways and other answers at times. And sometimes they work very, very well. As an example, one of the things we were not taught about as doctors much about food reactivity. Now, a lot of people in Australia these days are gluten-free, okay, not many of them have celiac. So about everyone person who's a celiac, there are 10 people that are gluten-free in their diet. And we as doctors, kind of shrug our shoulders and sometimes worse. And so patients will, you know, there's no evidence that you're a celiac, well, that doesn't mean that they're not gluten reactive, they may react in ways that don't make antibodies so that you don't have an immunological marker that tells you this person is gluten reactive. So what happens for some of these people is they can't break down parts of the gluten molecule.  And there are a series of seven amino acids within that gladdened component that can have an opiate effect on the gut and on the brain. So you can get brain fogging, and feel fatigued, and become constipated and addicted to that food. A lot of children who are on the spectrum are actually reacting to gluten and casein because their gut wall is not healthy. And fragments of these molecules are coming into the body and having an impact on not just the gut, but on the brain. And when you identify that and eliminate that food, which is often difficult to do, you can have a profound effect in terms of waking up vets are. So that opiate reaction is because of a lack of an enzyme, the enzyme is called di peptidase four or DPP four, giving DPP four or withdrawing gluten and dairy, for some of these children is just a game-changer. And it may also mean that they can withdraw some of the medications if their behaviour is very much better, and they're more alert, or really what approaches. 

Dr Sinclair Bode  08:01

There's not you know, you sort of you think of diet, you think of the gut wall, you think of nutrients you might be depleted in, that's one dimension, there is the use of selected nutrients, things like cannabis. As an example, I do a lot of cannabis work. But I'll also use supplements things like Sammy, vitamin D, in acetylcysteine, zinc, frequently magnesium, and these things can really have profound effects in terms of improving cognitive skills, enzyme pathways, understanding that there might be significant alterations in the gut biome. And giving appropriate help to get a better biome can also make a difference. And this is something that I've been lucky enough to have learned about 1520 years ago, it's just something that we're starting to talk about as doctors in the last three or four years.

Dr Sinclair Bode  09:08

when it comes to a lot of brain functionality. There's a lot of head doctors out there. There's a lot of doctors, but we're not really looking at what's going on in the brain and if that's linked to the gut. So my a lot of my stuff, and I'm still learning about it comes from my gut, which you did identify. And there's so much research now, like proper research that is showing that our gut is our second brain

Dr Sinclair Bode  09:33

talking about the biome, for instance, our current model of thinking is very prescriptive. What can you give me to change my bio? Okay, what particular probiotics should I be in, And it's just medical thinking it's just so short of the mark. I mean, the point is that you're buying interacts with what you're eating every day. So if you change what you're eating, you will change your biome. Day by day, you'll have an influence on changing your biome. If you have a diversity of foods, you're likely to have a larger diversity within your biome, which we know is a good thing if you put poisons into your mouth, and that can include things like preservatives, of course, antibiotics, those things, any fungal, that will alter the biome. Okay. But the biome isn't just what's in your gut, the biomes what is in your mouth, what you've got on your skin, it's also in the soil, you know, you think about how we evolved, you know, we would pull something out of the soil and eat it, you know, we wouldn't scrub it and peel it, we didn't have running clean water. And, you know, often these root vegetables would be in the soils where we and other animals were defecating. So there was a kind of a dynamic, and now we're talking about faecal microbial transplants as if this is a new thing, but in fact, it's all data. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, we're healthy. Well, it's how we evolved. And you can look at biomes in different communities, and they're quite different. And it's because they have contact with the soil and with their food, that the biome of vegetarians, vegans in India will be very different from the biome of vegans in Australia will be very different from the biomes of potentially made it as those that have very limited foods are going to have more limited biomes. And, you know, then there are things like Syrian birth, you know, there has an impact on the kind of biome that you're exposed to. It's fascinating stuff.

Mahalia  11:46

How have you gone from then thinking holistic to then becoming a general practitioner, have you been challenged?

Dr Sinclair Bode  11:58

I have a passion for is to make a difference, Okay. And if somebody comes into me with a problem, and I can't help them with an approach, then what else can I do I need to look outside of, I need to look for other answers, in a sense. Now, many of the people that come in and see me come in specifically, because they haven't had answers from others who are doing the sort of thinking that we taught to do prescriptively when we come out of medical school, I guess, after 30 years, plus of looking for other answers and doing other courses and, and listening to your patients looking at, I'm lucky enough to have patients that come back to me and they're better. And it's not because of what I did is because of what someone else did. And I sit on the edge of my chair and I say, Okay, tell me what happened, what did they do? How do they do that? And that gives you the opportunity to know and I'll write down the names of people that are here are currently making a difference to others, so that I know that I can use them when I recognise there's a piece of the puzzle that I may be able to put together that I can. Well, I mean, you know, how else can you learn? You know, if you think, you know, as a young man when I came out of medical school, in the first year auto was frightened and really struggling to keep up not frightened, exhilarated. But overall, there was so much to learn within a few years. I guess in the hospital system, you were good at doing what you did, but it was very limited. When I left the hospital system, I thought I was a good doctor. And it wasn't until I became a general practitioner and was confronted with things that I had no answer to chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chemical sensitivities, people with behavioural issues, people with depression that weren't responding to medication, that I realised how much more there was to know and how limited my approach was. I guess that opens doors to thinking in other ways if you actually choose to see those doors and open them.

Mahalia  14:12

have you lost patients who find the textbook approach easier?

Dr Sinclair Bode  14:18

I guess I have to be honest, it's hard to get in to see me. I don't take many patients on and people are prepared to wait if they are looking for an answer. They're more inclined to be motivated and listen to what you have to say. But I'm pretty good at seeing if it's not gonna work. You can see it in body language. You can see it in eye contact. We can see if, you have a child that sort of walking over the walls and walking up the ceilings of your room, and you say to a busy parent, you have to take him off gluten, you'll never see that patient again. So what you do is you say look, I think gluten might be an issue, but there are Some other things going on that we need to tackle first. The other thing you can do when you are giving a person a task that they can't see themselves completing is, you can actually take them on a journey with just a few words. So you can say, just imagine, coming back here in six weeks time, you have more energy than you've had in years, your head is clear, your tummy feels great, you didn't know that you could feel this? Well, and all you've done is taken XYZ out of your diet. The point is that if you with your words, take them on that journey, just for an instant, give them the feeling that in the future, they may actually have the opportunity to be healthy again, they're more likely to walk down a path that you're taking them on to get there. The other thing is, you know, you also don't set people up. It's like, I'll say to people, look, if you come back here in six weeks time, you have to do it. That's cool. You know, we're all human. Just try it.

Mahalia  16:02

Give it a go. What about people who get better, through discovering what they need, what they don't need, changing their approach, changing what they eat, what they take, who then do it, it works, amazingly. And then they're presented with something that goes down the track...

Dr Sinclair Bode  16:18

there's always going to be the reason for why so is so if I'm reading your question correctly, if if you are given a solution, and it's working for a while, but then it no longer works, what else needs to be taken into consideration, my approach to complex health issues is, it's not one thing, there are pieces to a puzzle, it's a jigsaw. And if you can find enough significant pieces to the puzzle, you might need to find every piece. But if you've found four or five pieces, and the pieces starting to come out, maybe the rest of the puzzle was sort itself out, maybe it's not important to find all the other pieces to the puzzle. And then just sometimes, maybe you're missing a significant piece, and that becomes apparent over time. And then you go back to it. And the other thing is that we all lead dynamic laws, you know, we're getting older, things are changing in the environment, we don't eat the same things every day. We don't, you know, we go through relationship breakups, we develop a tumour, whatever those things are going to change who you are when you get them, or when you experience that stress. And that might then need to be dealt with and it might need to be dealt with in a different way. And what got you to a position of health beforehand, whilst it was relevant isn't sufficient. And you need to find something else. Yeah, psychological intervention, sometimes just listening to a person and being supportive, looking them in the eye, and they look, that's awful.

Mahalia  18:00

So for someone who is unable to see you, for example, in your approach, and they're struggling, what's a simple thing that we can think to do or what's a mindset that we can have around a way of approaching illness?

Dr Sinclair Bode  18:18

I think we're too willing to surrender our power to others. I think we need to be proactive for our own health, instead of running to lots of doors and knocking on them and saying, what can you do to help me we need to have the courage to actually look in the mirror and say, What can I do to change this in a positive way? So that would be my first thing. The answers are all around us if we choose to look. And if you can't find the answers with the people that you're seeking help with, don't be afraid to look within or to seek help from another direction.

Mahalia  19:02

Can you share a story of someone you've helped, obviously without giving away their client identity? Just an example.

Dr Sinclair Bode  19:17

I saw someone yesterday for the second time, and she came to me about a month ago and she had a huge swelling on the side of her neck. And she was told it was a tumour. And that is, it needed chemotherapy and radiotherapy and it didn't sit comfortably with her. She didn't want to do that. Okay, which is pretty courageous, really. So I get people like that. And the question is, how do you help people out that well, in her case, I listened to her story and her story was that she'd had some dental work done and a few weeks later alarm started to appear on the left side of the neck and got bigger and bigger over a period of months. And she then went to a GP and they sort of organised scans and blood tests and, and then ultimately biopsy. And the interesting thing is that I looked at the report of the biopsy in of the scans. And on the biopsy, there were no malignant cells found. And I thought I wonder if this is an infective thing. So, I did some things, the first thing is I thought, well, vitamin D, is going to be low on this lady have a blood test, and then immediately after the blood test have a single dose of vitamin D 100,000 units, which is just what I choose to do on this occasion because we need to help this study quickly. We also did some other blood tests, we sort of looked at Mercury, because she'd actually had her amalgams removed prior to the slump coming up, and I looked at Selenium and some zinc. But the other thing I did was, I understand that there can be bacteria in the mouth and the base of teeth that can make people quite unwell. And I wondered whether she had that. So I organised an OPG, which has an X-ray of her jaw. And then I gave her a script for an antibiotic. And this is all in the first console, 40-minute console. And it's like, come and see me in a few weeks time. And we'll go through the results, see how you've done with what we've started. The other thing she had was she had a lot of pain on the left side of the head right the way out to her temporal area, and she couldn't sleep properly at night. And that was because this mess which was now 12 by 10 centimetres and raised about three centimetres was pushing on a muscle and some nerves this do quite a mess to the muscle. Any anyway, so this lady again yesterday, lo and behold, the lump had reduced in size by two centimetres in one direction or the other, her headaches are gone within a couple of days of starting the treatment. So I don't know why she's responding. And I don't know whether she's going to respond completely. But it's just amazing to see people respond in that situation. Now, she came to me because the diagnosis didn't sit comfortably with her. And I got to be careful not to condone patients to do that kind of thing. You know, they should be listening to their experts. But when it doesn't sit comfortably, what tends to happen is those experts will disempower that person or denigrate them, they'll put them down. I chose to listen to her story and try to work with her now it's going to work or it wasn't. And obviously, the lump gets bigger. And I think I said that on the first occasion. If this doesn't work quickly, you need to do something else. But just to see that change in a few short weeks, because two weeks

Mahalia  23:03

You considered going back to the source of what it could be and listened to her story. 

Dr Sinclair Bode  23:07

Yeah, I didn't assume it was a tumour, and why did it come on? could it be an infection? So on spec, we haven't got much time here. Let's work quickly do some things to help your immune system vitamin D zinc, look for the cause of the problem, and let's try an antibiotic and something else that might make a difference and headaches gone completely like she, you know, she knew within a few days that things were changing. But then yesterday, she didn't realise it had shrunk as much as a hand until I got out the tape measure.

Mahalia  23:47

Were you as surprised?

Dr Sinclair Bode  23:54

Yeah, I was surprised. I'm more delighted for her. And I just hope that we can find a solution and see her through the other side because that would mean that she doesn't have to have unnecessary treatment. You know, that we found another way.

Mahalia  24:13

Do you feel like the western medical model failed her?

Dr Sinclair Bode  24:18

I think the people she saw failed her. Yeah. You know, well, they felt themselves. They felt themselves because they assumed that they knew what was going on. And yet, you know, even when you looked at the cytology report from the fine needle aspiration biopsy, there was no, the comment was there were no malignant cells found. It makes

Mahalia  24:40

I feel ill thinking about that because we put so much trust and faith into doctors and like you said....

Dr Sinclair Bode  24:47

None of us are infallible, but maybe if you can learn something from the mistakes that you have and have humility, when you listen to stories and when you decision isn't correct, you know you have the chance to learn and be better.

Mahalia  25:09

Have you ever watched that TV show House? The grumpy doctor with a walking stick. You are like the nice, tall friendly version of House. You go much deeper. And everyone loves that show. It was the most popular show. So it says a lot about who you are.

Dr Sinclair Bode  25:27

Well, that is very kind of you.

Mahalia  25:28

Well, it's true.

Mahalia  25:29

That concludes another episode of The Uncovery. Thank you so much for being here and sharing this space with me before you go. I would love to remind you that if you are struggling with self-love, anxiety, or gaining momentum, you do not need to walk alone. I am here to empower you to really help you throw your excuses away. And to get clear on purposeful living. It is my passion, as I say to help you truly live in a beautiful state.

Mahalia  25:57

So in saying that, I have some very exciting news, I am finally opening up more space and energy to work with the new people. So if you are wanting to join my community of warriors, if you would love to work with me one on one, if you feel drawn to making this year, your year, and you know that you deserve this time for transformation, please jump into the description of this episode to book a free no-obligation call with me. So with that all being said, I am so excited to bring another episode to you this week. Yes, two episodes in one week. So please make sure you subscribe not to miss out on this extremely amazing episode, which is all about creating productivity in your life, how you can create an extraordinary life just using simple life hacks. Until then, they will look after yourself and if you're feeling generous and you want to help the uncovered podcast, please share this episode. Please share content and make sure you subscribe, review and subscribe again. Bye