61: Can Your Cure Bowel Disease (Crohn's and Colitis)?

Can IBD actually be healed, or even cured? To say "no" would be to assume that inflammation is a random occurrence, which isn’t possible. So we have to say “yes”, because once you know what’s causing it, you can remove the problem and inflammation should stop. 

I do believe that we will see a true cure in the coming years.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Remission vs curing
• What causes bowel disease (just 3 things)
• Most common root causes of Crohn's + colitis
• Removing the root cause(s)
• Diets and supplements to support IBD

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Transcript

0:00

Can IBD actually be healed? Can you cure Crohn's colitis? Now, I think to say no would be to assume that inflammation is a random occurrence, right, which isn't possible. Inflammation always has a root cause. So, we have to say yes, because once you know what's causing it, you can remove the problem. Inflammation should stop, right? I mean, that's just the logic of it. Stop the thing causing inflammation. Inflammation goes away. Poof, problem solved. The issue is that with traditional medicine, Western medicine, we suppress the inflammatory responses rather than addressing the reason why they're happening in the first place. And so, in this video, you're going to learn, first and foremost, what's causing your IBD. We're going to talk about how you can rebalance your immune system to stop these flares from happening, how to remove the root cause so you can actually begin the healing process. And of course, I want to discuss the difference between curing and putting things into remission. It's a very important distinction. And of course, we're going to talk about some supplements and foods that you can use to support you during this process. Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease and I'm here to help you do it too, because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below. Now, if you're new here, my name is Josh Dech. I'm a gut specialist and physician consultant for complex cases of Crohn's, Colitis, and IBS. I do these videos so you can learn to heal your gut naturally, because contrary to popular belief, it can be done and they're just not genetic conditions. So, first of all, let's discuss this. What is the difference between cure and remission? Because this is a really big sticking point for a lot of people. It's important to split the difference. Remission is just a temporary, either long or short period of time where you're going to be free of symptoms. You're not experiencing inflammation, diarrhea, mucus, bloat, blood pain, whatever it is, or a severe reduction of symptoms, but it's temporary. Therefore, it's going to come back. Whereas a cure, capital C, cure, this is a permanent fix or a solution to a disease. The problem is, when I bring up the concept of curing, what's supposedly an incurable disease, people want to fight me because what they want in a conventional cure is like a pill or a shot that everybody's just going to get one across the board and everyone's going to be better. But that doesn't exist. It just simply doesn't happen. It's kind of like saying, I want one surgery to fix all injuries ever or one surgery to do all aesthetic procedures ever. That's just, it's so stupidly illogical. So we're talking about a cure. We're talking about permanent removal and fix of the residual damage with no sign of it coming back and everything is gone, your body's healthy and healed. And having not looked at your previous medical charts, you would never know you had disease to begin with. I've seen this countless times and that's why we're talking about this today. Cure versus remission. One is temporary, one is permanent. Now naturally then I would be arguing if you remove the thing or things that are making you sick, how long do you have to be in quote remission to be considered a cure? If you remove all the things and fix the residual damage and your body no longer has any signs of inflammation, you never know unless looking at paper that says you had this disease diagnosis at one point, at what point can you actually call it a cure? And if we can't establish that, then we have an incurable disease by definition, not by science. This is a very important distinction to make. So we have to talk about this. What is causing bowel disease? If you've watched my lives and my lectures before, you'll know it comes down to three things. And I want to reiterate this on nearly every episode I do because this is so, so, so important. Three things only that cause bowel disease. First is going to be toxins. Any kind of toxin, that's going to be, it's a big long list honestly. You can look at chronic stress, you can look at alcohol, you can look at food, you can look at chemical additives. That's going to be anywhere from pesticides to emulsifiers and food dyes and colorings and gasoline and petroleum products, any kind of chemical you can name. We can look at mycotoxins or mold toxicity. Chronically high blood sugar can be toxic to your system. There's a countless number of toxins that we consider. The second thing we want to look at is going to be deficiencies. Deficiencies of what? Basic things your body needs to thrive. When you're deficient in those, your body starts to break down. This is going to include anything from vitamins and minerals. This could be exercise. This could be sunlight. Fresh air, water, anything that your body needs to thrive on a day-to-day basis. Quality sleep, a proper gut-brain connection, a proper upbringing. All these things, personality traits, that chronic stress that you get into as being a type A, all these things can contribute under toxic deficiencies. The third reason we get sick ever, ever, ever across the board is going to be microbes, which covers viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites. This is why you get sick. Now that we've identified it, we just have to figure out what three things or combination of these three things are making you sick. I don't think I can break it down any simpler. Honestly, I brought this to some of the brightest minds in the world. We're talking Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, Dr. Mark Hyman. We've had these conversations like, yeah, I agree. There's three things that make you sick. The issue is we don't get to the nitty-gritty and figure out what these things are that are making you sick. We just kind of assume that it's normal to have this level of glyphosate in your body because everybody has glyphosate in their body now. It's normal because it's common, not because it's optimal. We have to look at what are the things making you sick. Once we identify these, they can be removed. Like I said, if you can remove the thing or things that are creating inflammation, whatever toxins, deficiencies, microbes, you give your body the tools, the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, the rest, and recovery, whatever it is that you need to begin healing, and you get rid of the microbes that are overgrown, your body will just heal. The only thing we have left to deal with, if it's even still there, is your immune system being imbalanced. Once you can correct that, you get healed. One of the most common things that I see, I've seen over 463 cases of bowel disease in my practice. The most common things, bar none, I see driving bowel disease are going to be parasites. That's a microbe. We see mold, which is a fungus, but mycotoxins are a toxin. We see microbes of some kind, like dysbiosis, overgrowth, opportunistic, or some kind of candida, which fits under bacteria, fungi. We see latent viral infections, like Epstein-Barr or CMV, that cytomegalovirus, but 90 plus percent of the population has Epstein-Barr. I wouldn't necessarily say this virus is causing the issue, but rather your immune system is busy doing other things. It's been suppressed, so this latent virus becomes active. I've seen norovirus, but either way, they're microbes. Then, of course, we also see chronic stress. Chronic stress can be toxic at high levels. Chronic stress erodes your gut microbiome. It erodes your gut lining. It triggers inflammation. The same inflammatory pathways of your immune system that are currently hyperactive with bowel disease, they use drugs to suppress those immune pathways. Well, those same pathways are pushed back up by stress. This is why, even on medication, when you're stressed, you go into a flare because that immune activity supersedes the suppressive drug. This is why we get sick. The top things are parasites, mold, candida, dysbiosis, chronic stress. Dysbiosis being microbes, fungi, viruses, etc. That's it. Other things, again, I have seen being major contributing factors that I believe did create the disease over time as it eroded the body are things like poor diet. People who are eating Chick-fil-A and McDonald's on an ongoing basis. They're binge drinking. They're staying up all night. They're shooting drugs. I've seen people with meth and heroin in their background, crack, you name it. I've seen people who are alcoholics. I've seen people on medication. I've seen people, you name it, doing all kinds of wild stuff, making themselves very, very sick. But the idea is that something is creating this disease and these cause immune hyperactivity. Okay. Now, I'm going to touch on this briefly because I spent entire lectures doing just this conversation. Let's talk about immune hyperactivity. There's four stages. The first is going to be acute. It comes in, it's one, it's done. Flu, food poisoning, boom, gone. The problem is over time when these things last, your body can't get rid of it, you're overexposed, it becomes chronic. Okay. Then we get what's called immune mediated, and then we have immunodeficiency or even one could argue collapse. I'll explain these briefly. Think about having one stressful day. Bad day at work, you shake it off, whoop-dee, you're good, your body recovers. But if you go chronic stress year over year over year where you're stressed and stressed and stressed, it's going to wear on you until one day you snap. That's what your immune system does. It's dealing with acute stressors, no big deal. On and on the stressors go until one day you have this hyperactive immune response, your body snaps, it goes haywire and now you have ulcers, strictures, fistulas, flare-ups, you name it, because it's gone hyperreactive. It's called an immune mediated response. In fact, the Crohn's Colitis Foundation, the Mayo Clinic have all downgraded IBD from autoimmune to immune mediated, living under the autoimmune umbrella because that's the treatment that they use, but it's a different response. Your body's not actually attacking itself. In 99.9% of cases, that's what the data actually shows. Then after a certain time, you freak out and then you're rocking yourself to sleep in the corner, that's immune collapse. It's pretty rare, but we see this with mold toxicity much of the time, like SERS or chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Here's the idea. If we remove the toxins, microbes, deficiencies, and we fix the damage to your immune system, it's hyperreactive, we rejuvenate, rebalance that immune system, it's no longer hyperreactive. Just like you, you have a mental breakdown, you go to therapy, you're better again. Same thing with your system. It's not that complicated. I mean, it is, but it isn't. The idea is very, very simple. If there's nothing left to react to, are you cured or are you in remission? Well, I would argue remission because your immune system is still hyperreactive. Once you fix and rebalance your immune system and do everything in your power through pharmaceuticals and or natural solutions, whatever it looks like, you're no longer dependent on them. Your body is regulating itself. Are you cured or are you in remission? If you say, you know what, I went through this process, I got sick again. Well, guess what? You didn't complete it. There are still residual toxins, microbes, deficiencies, or imbalances. It can take years sometimes to get your body back to a full state of healing because you have to rebuild the microbiome, your gut lining, there's a lot of layers to it. But if you can get rid of those three things that make you sick, fix the immune system, your body can heal itself. So how do we remove that? Well, the first thing we have to look at is some very basic, basic stuff. First, let's look at inputs. Inputs equal outputs. And if your outputs are inflammation, well, guess what? It's going to suck. What you eat, you poop. What you put into your body, your body uses to react with. Whether it's poop or a chemical change or a cellular response or a metabolic change, whatever it is. Okay, that's fine. So, food, water. If you're eating junk food, if you're drinking crap water, if you're living in an area near industrial waste, you're getting chemicals into your system, those are toxins. If you're drinking from well water, you're getting toxins a lot of the time because our water's not clean anymore. Are you being exposed to a moldy home? That's a toxin and a microbe mold is fungus. What are the things that your inputs do you have? Even if you say, I got clean food, clean water, I'm not seeing relief. Okay, that's fine. That might be drops in a bucket, but who wants to add more drops into an overfilled bucket? It takes time. Okay, the next thing we want to do after checking your inputs, we can test and assess. If I say, hey, you're living in a moldy home, you're cleaning mold off your walls from time to time, it's probably worse under the surface it's pushing through. So, we can test your home for mold. We can test you for mold. If you've had food poisoning, maybe you now have an autoimmune SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We've seen that a lot. We actually just did some talks on SIBO fairly recently. Check that on YouTube or the podcast. SIBO is an issue. Well, if you have SIBO and you don't take care of it, now we have ongoing issues. If parasites are creating SIBO and you kill all the SIBO, the bacterial overgrowth, but don't address the parasites, the bacteria overgrows. So, we constantly have to go back and go back through this cycle of removing the things and balancing your immune system until there's nothing left to fix. Otherwise, you are just in remission and your body can keep ahead of it until it can't. And so, our process is very, very simple. Once we can identify your inputs, your outputs, we can test and assess, we go through your history. Were you bottle fed as a baby? Were you given antibiotics? Do you have ear infections that's early possible or lymphatic infections like tonsillitis that's typical of a mold infection? And then we can see how you had issues like acne and chronic stress growing up and you were given medications and antibiotics. We can build this layer that slowly chipped away at your immune system in your gut until it became Crohn's or colitis. But you didn't always have it. It wasn't always just dormant. It got there somehow. Your doctor's just not taking the hours it takes to go through your stuff to figure it out. And that's bullshit because now you're suffering from that. History matters. Timing matters. So, how do we get through it? Okay. The first thing's first. Very, very simple. It's our drainage 5R process. The more I talk about this, the more I might just explain is like the D and 6R. But here's what we're going to say, okay? We're going to say D, 5R, and I'm going to even throw another R and you'll see why in a minute. D stands for drainage. Open the exit doors inside of your body. Liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, your sinuses, skin, bowels, kidney, lymphatic system. These are how things move through and get out of your body. If you have junked up drainage, things can only move around your body, landing in other places, re-inflaming you without actually getting out. It's moving the trash around from one room to another, not bringing it out to the curb. So, we need proper drainage. Again, I'm not going through this D, 5R in intensive detail. I have whole episodes on it. The next thing we're going to do is go through to remove. We talked about toxins, microbes, deficiencies. So, the first R is to remove those toxins, microbes, deficiencies that are inflaming you. And then guess what? Remember, we have toxins, microbes, and deficiencies that are making you sick. Well, we remove the toxin or the microbe. If you're deficient in vitamins, minerals, amino acids, quality sleep, whatever it is, guess what the second R is? Replenish. Give your body the things that it's lacking. You might be listening like, Josh, I did this already. We're getting there. I promise. Hang tight, okay? So, we've removed the problem. We've replenished what you're low in. And then we're going to rebuild and repair. What does that mean? Your gut microbiome, okay? Your gut lining, that leaky gut creates inflammation throughout your system. It triggers your immune system to go haywire. We're going to rebuild and repair that microbiome or repair that gut lining. Here's the last thing. If you've not done this yet, this is why you keep going backward. We have to rejuvenate. That means rejuvenate means rebalance. Not boost your immune system, rebalance your immune system. You might have a hyperactive. Remember, we talked about stage 1, 2, 3, 4 of your immune system. Stage 3 is immune mediated. It's freaking out. What do you do? You boost it. If you get somebody who is already freaking out and you boost that freak out pathway, it gets worse. Same with you. If your immune system is hyperreactive and you boost it, it can get worse. We want to rejuvenate, bring it down, bring it back to balance. That's a carefully tailored process. You go, Josh, I already did this. I got sick again. Guess what? Here's your 6R. Repeat because you missed something along the way or your body's able to identify something. Drain, remove, replenish, rebuild, repair, rejuvenate, repeat. If you're still missing things along the way, repeat. This, I would argue, could cure Crohn's colitis. I've got cases of clients we've seen over the years, no issues. It's been years since we've seen them. They're perfectly fine. Is it remission or is it a cure? I don't know. I don't make the rules. There's no sign of it coming back. If you didn't look at their paperwork, you'd never know they had bowel disease. Colonoscopies are clear. Symptoms are clear. They can travel, eat, drink, do what they want, live their life normally. They just have to maintain healthy habits like anybody else or they get sick, just like anybody else. Is it a cure or is it remission? In my opinion, who gives a shit? As long as you're feeling better and your body has the resilience to stay that way. That's what matters. If you want to take food supplements to support this, generally speaking, whole foods, tolerable foods, low histamine foods. Because IBD, Crohn's colitis, tends to be an elevated response of histamine-based pathways of your immune system. Lowering histamine intake can support that. Liver support, bile support stuff. Tadcom, milk thistle, different blends. All those things are great. Soy lecithin. I prefer sunflower. Again, it's lower histamine. Sunflower lecithin. Consider different types of diets. Again, they may not fix you, but they're a huge help, whether you feel the symptoms right now or not. Things like low FODMAP, SCD, AIP. Try low oxalate, low salicylate, low FODMAP. Just try these different things and see if you get benefits, because at some point something will click, especially in combination with everything else. Supplements. Avoid immune boosters. You don't know what you're boosting, so don't do it. You're going to mess it up. Focus on nutrients and resources that your body needs. Omegas, vitamins, minerals, good quality sleep. Avoid mushroom blends or herbal blends that are designed to boost your immune system. Have to go back to basics. Just give it basic nutrients. If you're confused about this, ask me for help. We're here to help. I want to make sure you get resources to help. My team and I, we can work with you hands-on. Custom programs built for you, 16 weeks to make sure you get the help that you need to begin the reversal process. Like I said, we're at 463 cases now through our program. It can be done. We're still trying to get the literature published. Turns out it's very expensive and a very long process, but we are in the process of actually publishing the literature on this. I'm lecturing because it's been so effective. Doctors are seeing this. I'm lecturing for the Priority Health Academy. I'm consulting for physicians. I'm not saying, yay Josh, yay me. Who cares? I want the information out there. What I'm saying is it's effective regardless of who's giving it to you. It exists and it's real. It's just not a study yet because it takes years to get this stuff published. So if you want help, here's how you can do it. Right now, if you're on YouTube, watching on YouTube, you're hearing banging in the background. You've got a puppy who doesn't want to chew on her blanket. She likes to chew on the hardwood floor. But if you're on YouTube with a podcast, all you got to do is check the links below in the show notes or below the video. There's a link there. Send me an email. Just want to inquire. That's cool. Check out more content. It's all free. Shoot me an email, book a call, whatever you need. On that note, guys, thanks so much for being here. You can catch these all online, podcasts, YouTube, the works. And if you want to reach out, just have a conversation. Just see what it looks like. We'll comment the word solution or send me a DM with the word solution. We're going to get you some help. If you're on YouTube and on the podcast, check the links below. Send me an email, book a call, ask a question. We just want you to get help. See you next time. One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years. And if this for the first time is really starting to click and it's starting to make sense, you're going, wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly I wasn't. And you're telling me there's no cause. If you're understanding finally that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email. Ask a question. See if a program is a right fit for you. Because I promise you, this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this. And IBD can be reversed.