Stop Guessing Your Gut Fix

Your gut symptoms are loud, but they may be telling the wrong story. If you’ve tried probiotics, digestive enzymes, elimination diets, or the latest social media gut protocol and you’re still dealing with reflux, bloating, constipation, fatigue, or brain fog, we’re here to give you a real plan instead of another guess.

We walk through why so many people stay stuck: modern care often looks for clear pathology, while gut dysfunction can simmer for years with “normal” scopes and short-term relief. From there, we make the case for targeted testing, especially comprehensive stool testing, to uncover what’s actually driving your gut health issues. We talk microbiome imbalance and dysbiosis, inflammation markers, digestive and absorption clues, and why two people with the same symptom can need totally different solutions.

Then we lay out the Five R roadmap we use for gut healing: Remove, Replace, Reinoculate, Repair, and Rebalance. That last step matters more than most people realize because the gut brain connection runs through your nervous system. When you’re stuck in fight or flight, digestion, recovery, hormone balance, and healing all suffer. We also set expectations: healing happens in layers, symptoms can fluctuate, and consistency beats “quick fixes.”

If you want help for yourself or someone you love, listen through, share the episode, and then subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. If this helped, leave a review and tell us what gut symptom you’re trying to solve.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to Living a Full Life. Over the last two episodes, we talked about the gut brain connection and how gut dysfunction can communicate to symptoms throughout the body. Today we're talking about the biggest question of all. How do you actually heal the gut? We finally got to the episode. I know this is the one that wraps it all together, but I found that the other episodes

How Gut Healing Really Works

SPEAKER_00 0:23

to be really important in the understanding of why this is so important. Healing the gut is not just taking probiotics and hoping for the best. Many people are spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on supplements while never identifying what's actually causing the dysfunction in the first place. If you don't identify the root problem, you end up guessing. And guessing gets you nowhere. Welcome to Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchori, and we're going to wrap up this gut brain connection stuff on how you can heal if you've been suffering, how you can truly heal the gut. It just takes effort. It's not even that hard. It's not that hard. When you have the map and you know how to get there, it's not that hard. Just take the turns, take the rights, use your signals, follow the traffic signals, obey the speed limit, and you'll get there safe and sound. That's how this all works. And there's just no roadmap when it comes to the gut in modern medicine. We don't do that. We treat pathology in medicine. So if you don't have an organ that has an issue, then we can't help you. That's just the way it works. If there's no pathology, there's no treatment. So with gut issues, you can do it endoscopy. You can do a colonoscopy, and it can look relatively well. They may just check a polyp and that's it. And you're like, but listen, I've got digestive issues, and they're looking in there. There's a little bit of inflammation, but it's not chronic or it's not really bad, or it's not ulcerative colite, it's not ulcering, it's not uh perforating. You'd be like, man, it's red. They're like, it's discolored, it's red, you're inflamed. Here's some steroids to reduce the inflammation, but you can only take that for seven to ten days. What do you do for the next 10 years, right? So let's start with why so many people stay stuck in this when they're trying to help. People take probiotics, digestive enzymes, green powders or gut powders without any real understanding of what their body actually needs. They're just guessing. They're like, um, maybe I need a probiotic. Uh, maybe I need something to

Why Supplements And Trends Fail

SPEAKER_00 2:35

help me digest better because I have reflux. But what they really need, and they're chasing symptoms, the reflex, the irritable bowel, the whatever it is, chasing and chasing and chasing. And then there's all these trends going on: social media health trends, elimination diets, detoxes, extreme protocols, only carnivore, only eating bananas. Uh it's crazy what's out there. A protocol that helps someone online may not address your underlying problem. And I'm gonna go even one step further. A protocol that helps someone online, you're not getting the full story of it, and it will not help you with your condition. Man, people got on this carnivore thing quickly, huh? It helped me. I feel so great. I lost weight, uh, my tummy feels better. You should try it too. They're telling everyone to try it. And then some people are like, Man, am I supposed to feel better? I don't really feel better. Uh, you know, and some people feel worse. They're like, what the heck? That's worse. At least having those symptoms helps people understand, like, I feel worse, I'm stopping. Makes sense. But the other people that are on the fence, they're like, I don't feel any better. Am I doing the right thing? And they stick with it, um, may not get to a solution with that either. And feeling better is just one step a bit. It doesn't mean we're that we're truly better. So only treating symptoms like reflux, bloating, constipation, fatigue. Symptoms are important, but symptoms are not always the root cause. We have to remember that. Healing requires investigation, not guessing. One of the biggest shifts in healthcare is moving from symptom management to understand, understanding why dysfunction exists. And that takes time. And that's something modern medicine does not have. Because a patient in, a patient out, a patient in, a patient out, a patient in, a patient out. That's how it works. They're on the clock. They literally are. We know this, right? The seven-minute appointment or whatever's going on there, uh, both in the hospital, in the ER, in the urgent care, and in primary care. It's on the clock. You have to see so many people per day, especially if they're in network with insurances, because now they're taking contracted discounted rates per person getting paid the insurance rates, which is fine. This doesn't have to be about money. But that's why seven minutes with somebody doesn't work. When we sit down with people at 60, 90 minutes, I mean, we need to understand what's not the first time, every time, every time you sit down with them, you start the program of care, you get the stool test back or the testing back, you set a protocol, you start the protocol, you do that for 90 days, but we talk in 30 days, not 90 days, talk in 30 days, and 30, come back in four weeks, sit down, might not be an hour and a half, it might be half an hour, but it's half an hour. You sit down, you talk, you go through, or virtually on Zoom, whatever works, and you get you get the health care that you need. So we need to understand why the dysfunction exists, and that takes time. You have to find a provider that gives you the time and is knowledgeable. Because a new a new provider just out of school has lots of time. Lots of time, but hasn't seen that many cases of lupus before or um SIBO, or you know, hasn't seen the cases yet, right? Nothing against them. They got they got to start somewhere. And they have lots of time for you. But with experience comes managing of time and outcomes, which that's your that's your best combination right there. So the testing. This is how we're gonna find the solutions. Stool testing is the number one microbiome test you can do that we have today in 2026 in all of science is a stool test. The better labs you send them to, the more vast the reporting is, and the better the analysis is that comes from the lab. The lab will actually not only tell you what's high and low

The Case For Stool Testing

SPEAKER_00 6:30

for bacteria, it will give an example, it will give a report on each and every family of bacteria that's there and why high and low and what it could mean. That is for you as a patient to understand. It's for your healthcare provider to be like, okay, I need to focus on these that are causing most of the dysbiosis. And then the provider uses their knowledge on those bacteria for that dysbiosis and how to treat it. Do we attack the bad, the high level of bad bacteria that's there first? Or is the low level of good bacteria that are hanging on to survive in this environment the bigger issue right now? And do we have to fuel that and get them uh better? Is the bad bacteria interacting with the good bacteria and killing them off? There's some species that do that. Is there's some that just don't coexist together well? There's others that do coexist together well, and one just eats up uh resources a lot quicker than the others. Lots of stuff that happens with that. And what ends up happening is we can dive into microbiome diversity, bacterial imbalances, yeast overgrowths, parasites that might be hiding in there, inflammation markers, digestive function, absorption markers. We get a true gut review. Two people can both have bloating, but for completely different reasons. That's why chasing symptoms doesn't work. You give one the probiotic, you give the other the exact same probiotic, they both come back not much better. Or maybe one says, I do feel a little bit better. One may have poor digestion, another may have dysbiosis, another may have inflammation, another may be under chronic stress. So we have to look at an individual as the unique individual and not just the symptoms. Does that make sense? Bloating, for example, what a great one. It could be for so many different reasons. So we have to look at that and where that could be coming from. Inflammation markers, these are important. Cal, uh, cal protectin, inflammatory indicators, gut integrity markers. These are all things that are being reviewed at the same time. Testing doesn't replace clinical judgment, but it gives us valuable information that helps personalize care instead of blindly guessing. It's amazing how we skip the testing, the testing phase. Imagine if your heart had symptoms, skipping beats, out of sync, almost feel like it's stopping for a little bit of time and then kickstarting again. I'm pretty sure you would be at on the phone pretty quick, either with your doctor or checking yourself into the ER same day. I don't think you'd wait. Many of you listening to this podcast, I don't think you'd be like, oh, see how I feel tomorrow. Well, maybe if you're a dude. If you have the Y chromosome, you you would probably do that. But if you if you have two X chromosomes, you're probably going straight to the ER that day, being like, this isn't right. It's funny when it comes to everything else, like the gut, we'll be like, Oh, you know what? And the point of that story was you go to the ER and they're like, ooh, what's happening? You're skipping beats, uh, low heart rate. Let's get you in for some testing. Oh, thank, thank God. Please test it out. And they're gonna be like, we're gonna do an EKG, we're gonna do an ultrasound, an echocardiogram, and a chest x-ray, like right now. And you're like, Yep, yes, you are. There'd be no pushback. Now, when your gut's hurting, this is what happens. One out of five people, they'll have this conversation with like, listen, we recommend starting with the stool test. It's 275 bucks. I forget what it what it is, uh specifically, $275, and uh the food sensitivity test that's $200. And all that goes through their head is $475, and they're like, Oh, I don't know. But the hard person walks out of there with all the testing, insurance covered it. It's January, so they walk out, and then they get a bill in the mail for $1,800 for their copay, right? For all that stuff that happened, or $1,200 or $800. No questions asked. That's going to go towards their out-of-network deductible or in-network deductible. And they look at it that way. But you're out $800, and for good reason. You checked your heart, and hopefully everything came back positive, and that's all great or negative, everything's clear, you're good. But when we look at the gut and we have this testing, money will stop us from doing that. And if you're true, if you're true about this, you're gonna trade the dollars for the results, and that's that's why we do this. So that can't be a hurdle for you. The five R's of gut healing that I have are remove, replace, reinoculate, repair, and rebalance. So when we remove, which is the first phase of repairing the gut, we have to remove the bad stuff. Inflammatory foods, processed foods,

The Five R Gut Healing Plan

SPEAKER_00 11:41

pathogens, triggers, excessive alcohol, and chronic stressors. So when we sit here, we talked about talk about doing the 30-day, 60-day, 90-day, 120-day protocol. Protocol. It's an entire protocol of a list of things to do. And that is diet, watching what you eat, eating particular things, removing inflammatory foods and processed foods, attacking the pathogens with the whatever supplementations or herbs or or uh medicines that are given, triggers, being mindful of the triggers, minimizing alcohol because it counteracts a lot of the supplements that we take, and chronic stressors through that 90 days or 120 days. That's the remove protocol. That's the part that the patient takes home and needs to follow in order for success to come. Then the doctor's helping you replace. Now we have to replace. Once we remove the stuff that's been feeding the bad guys, we have to replace it to feed the good guys or rebuild or whatever it is that we need to do or kill the parasite or whatever it may be. Digestive support, nutrients. We have to reprogram the nutrients into the system. Hydration, stomach acid support when appropriate, and enzyme support. So we're replacing not because everything's wrong, but because we want to make sure we control the gut with everything it needs for digestive support. Nutrition, hydration, enzymes, everything the gut needs to perform optimally is going to be given to it. So we remove and then we replace. Then once we balance the gut, where it's it may not, it's not perfect yet. Now the gut is functioning. This is where the patients start to notice changes in symptoms. Their skin clears up, their sleep improves. That's how we know inflammation markers are going down. We may resend for a blood test at that point, maybe not. Then we re-inoculate. Now, at this point, we don't want to overstress the gut system because we're doing this stuff. We're removing, we're replacing. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. We re-inoculate with probiotics, prebiotics, fiber, healthy bacteria, and diversity in foods. We need a vast array of specific foods that ferment, break down, amino acid change, certain balance of foods that do things inside the gut at specific times. Proteins take longer to digest, carbohydrates are faster, fats are a little bit slower. We we time these things properly through the diet over time, and that's where repair starts to happen. And that's the fourth R repair. The gut does this, your body does this. The gut lining support, sleep, recovery, and reducing inflammation overall. So now we're doing anti-inflammatory things for the whole body. Might be turmeric, curcumin, high dose. I could get into some IV stuff. You can help with some peptides now are really cool. They're newer, so I don't have much for you as far as background information. They're newer, but very promising in helping people, BPC 157, all these great little things that you can add there to help reduce inflammation and speed up recovery. And then five is rebalance. By this point, patients are feeling way better. They are so thankful that they did this. They're at a point where they're like, they see the light at the end of the tunnel and they get emotional. They're like, I can't believe this has been 15 years of my life. And I had to do this. It wasn't that difficult, but it was all it took, it takes time. This is where this is where we rebalance. And the beauty about our office is they're usually going to get adjusted and their nervous system is going to get some TLC as well. So now the whole body gets to heal as long as with their gut. And that's the combination that's in there with for the nervous system regulation. So we deal with the stress, we process the stress, we recover from the stress. You can't fully heal while you're stuck in fight or flight mode. We talked about that in the last episode or the first episode of this three-part series two weeks ago, about the parasympathetic nervous system not being able to do what it needs to do to function optimally because the sympathetic nervous system, the

Stress And The Nervous System Link

SPEAKER_00 15:59

stress response, is always functioning pedal to the metal every day. And the parasympathetic's like, come on, we got to hit the brake on the brake. You're the gas. We gotta, we gotta just pump the brake a little bit, you know. Can we do that? So it hasn't been able to, and that's where the nervous system connection works and getting adjusted, it pumps the brakes, it helps pump the brakes, gets us back into parasympathetic and sympathetic balance. And that's what sympathetic dominance does. It causes chronic stress physiology, it stimulates the vagus nerve abruptly, and the parasympathetics can't heal. And what that's the whole point of trying to get us back into this balance. And it's fascinating that the gut is the hub of this immaculate nervous system that we call the central nervous system. It's the hub, it's the it's where information gets processed through from the brain, and it's it's coordinated through the gut. And it's it's cool. I'm fascinated by where science is going through now on the gut. And it's amazing to be like, wow, I have to treat the gut just as well as I treat the brain. Um think about our brain, how we protect it, the skull, the helmets, everything we do is brain focused, because if that goes down, the whole system goes down. But we have to have that same TLC for the gut and take care of it and be careful on how we treat it so that we can maintain proper function. Digestion, healing, absorption, hormone balance, recovery all function best when the nervous system feels safe. Don't you just function best when your nervous system feels safe? I mean, just when your nervous system is agitated all the time, you feels like you're always looking over your shoulder, you're always in protection mode, you're always seeing the world defensively, you're waiting for the next thing to happen. You feel like you're ready for it, but you're just constantly in this protection mode. We're not designed to be like that all the time. We're designed to just rent. And when you and when you rent and you're relaxed, you just feel good. Don't you think about vacations that those best vacations you've been on, either with the family or without or with your spouse, where you come back, you're like, that was so awesome. Not only was I relaxed, things went well. Um, we enjoyed our time, we connected, there was good food. I mean, what what the things that you love? And then you wrap it up, you're like, that was a phenomenal, well worth the time, money, and effort to do this. It's because your nervous system was calm. That's what made you feel so great was being back to calmness in the nervous system. And what and that's where the hub of the chronic inflammation all happens. One thing people need to understand is that healing is not going to happen overnight. And we live in such a convenient time in human history where mostly anything you want or need can be given to you in the same day, if not the same moment. You're hungry, you

Why Healing Takes Time

SPEAKER_00 19:05

can go to the fridge. You can call Uber Eats, you can drive to a restaurant, you can drive through a drive-thru. If you're tired, you can take a nap. You literally can take a nap. You go in your car, our cars are our car seats are more luxurious than what people were sleeping on 100 years ago. Like you go sleep in the car, you take a nap. You need this, you can get it. You want that, you can do this. We live in the most convenient time in human history, and what that's done for us with the comfort. My wife, if she's listening, she's like, Don't you dare do it. Don't you dare do the fat American lazy thing. I'm not going to do it. But that comfort is what makes us sit back and just get too comfortable with life. And it's easy to just stock the pantry with your favorite snacks and every night go to those inflammatory snacks and eat those chips from the bad that are cooked in the bad oil, eat it and wonder why we're tired or we have brain fog. It's because we've created habits over time. And uh it's amazing. You look at your age and you're like, How am I this old? How am I turning this age this year? Where did that go? Where did that happen? And you then you stop and you're like, well, what habits have I had since my 20s that I still do today? Oh man, that chocolate fixation. Is that bad or is that good? That coffee fix, uh, caffeine fixation, is that bad or is that good? And you started analyzing the cumulative effects of the choices that we make. And then it's not a big surprise as to why we have something that we now have to take control of and heal. We can we can man up or or confess uh the damage and then be an adult about it and go ahead and fix it. So healing happens in layers. Understand that. Symptoms fluctuate through healing as well. You feel like because you know, when we have a headache, you take a motrin, the headache goes away 20 minutes later. We're used to that, right? Well, I took the medicine. Why am I not better? Because body doesn't work that way. That headache wasn't because of a lack of motrin in your blood system, and then you took a motrid and you fixed it. What happened is that it was dehydrated, it's stressed, there's neck tension, there's duramatic tension, whatever, there's increased uh brain blood pressure, whatever was causing it, the anti-inflammatory that you took reduced that irritation and gave you relief. That headache may come back tomorrow because you didn't deal with the source of the dehydration or whatever it may be. But we live in this quick access life now where we can get results pretty quickly. If you're having um an anaphylactic reaction, boom, epi pen in the thigh, adrenaline, the reaction re uh remits, and and then you're okay. Pretty cool stuff we have out there. Have a chronic infection, it's spreading. Get penicillin. Something right away on there, treat it, stop it, boom, don't lose an arm. Pretty cool what medicine can do for us. And but we're used to that. And we get discouraged when we're like, why didn't that medicine work? Why didn't that peptide work immediately in one day? So that's that's where we're all there. So the early wins that people have immediately once they start to do this and they have the right quarterback to do this is improved energy right away. They're like, yes, I I feel like I can do more, better sleep, which helps the energy, less bloating, clearer thinking, improved bowel movements, and reduced inflammation. And that all happens within the first week, week or weeks of doing this. So if you have any concerns for yourself or anyone you know, share the episodes, uh, get them to info at fulllifetampa.com, send us an email, reach out to us, and get into one of our neuroimmune protocols that we have. They're all specific to the patients, then based on their tests. And the goal is never for just symptom suppression.

Early Wins And How To Get Help

SPEAKER_00 23:05

That's never the goal. The goal is for restoring function and measuring that. The human body has an incredible ability to heal when you remove interference and provide the right environment. And I hope you guys this helps. Share it. Um we'll be back next week with a new topic. And health, you know, is not built through any supplements or any type of diets. Health built through consistent habits, reduced inflammation, nervous system balance, and addressing the root causes. That's where all of this happens together. And if uh and and what you do, I keep saying, and if you need help, email us at info at fulllifetamble.com. I do that each time. And I'm uh for this episode, you need help. I expect to hear from you so that I can do my job that I love and refer you anywhere in the country that you need to go to get better. It may be at our office, it may not be, but you, if you're suffering, I expect an email from you so that we can help you. This is a direct, a direct the reason you're listening to this right now is a direct act of God. Like there's a reason for this. Email us and let us help you, or anyone you love, like help them. Let us help them help you help them, help us, help them. Yeah, one of those things. Have a great and healthy week. Stay well, stay healthy, and take care.