68: Biologics for Bowel Disease - What You Need To Know and Alternatives

Biologics are scary immuno-suppresive drugs used to control the symptoms of bowel disease; and the top 5 most common drugs used in the USA run the risk of more than 200 side effects between them. So, is it worth the risk or is there a way to avoid having to be put on biologics?

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• What are biologics and how they work
• Pros and cons of biologics
• Risks vs beenfits
• Potential side effects
• Alternative options and how to make the best treatment decision for yourself

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Transcript

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Biologics are a very powerful immunosuppressive drug used by doctors to suppress the symptoms of Crohn's and colitis. The problem is they come with these big black box warnings and a laundry list of side effects that they can cause for you, leaving you to choose between the side effects of Crohn's colitis or the side effects of the drugs. Now here's the thing, in this episode you're going to be learning what biologics are and how they work, the pros and cons, the risks versus benefits, of course alternative options and how to make the best decision for yourself. Now before we start, I want to make a very important disclaimer. I am not anti-drug. The problem is we take these chronic inflammatory conditions like Crohn's colitis, we take acute treatments and apply them chronically. This is not the way to manage disease or to deal with disease properly, it's a way to control it. We don't want to control it here, our job is to get to the root cause and begin reversing it. 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. Really quickly, I just want to go through a couple of these side effects with you. Of all the ones that you can get, I picked out my top five, which are more severe ones and definitely more rare, but worth mentioning. Hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma, that's hepato meaning liver and spleen, lymphoma, which is cancer, extremely rare, but almost universally fatal. Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, often fatal, causes irreversible brain damage, caused by the recurrence triggering of a virus. Heart or liver failure, of course, can lead to death or transplant. Stevens-Johnson syndrome, also known as toxic epidermal necrolysis, which is a life-threatening skin-sloughing condition with a high ICU mortality. Stroke, serious cardiovascular events, so not super common, but dangerous when they do occur. Multiple sclerosis, like demyelinating syndrome, so basically MS, where you have permanent neurological disability. So, here's the thing about these drugs. They are not the long-term solution we're hoping for. It's just the only tools your doctors are giving you. Now, Biologic is a very specific type of drug. What Biologics are, is they are man-made synthesized proteins, and they're drugs that are made from living cells to target specific immune pathways that are involved in inflammation. So again, they're engineered proteins, and they're usually things like monoclonal antibodies. They block specific immune signals, or the primary immune drivers of Crohn's colitis. So, I think of your immune system kind of like an octopus. Each arm does a different thing, and each arm, depending on what you've got going on, will be activated. So, let's say arm number 6, 23, 1, and 17 are all extra active for you. They give you this drug, and it suppresses three of those four pathways. Perfect. Your immune system is going to calm down. Mostly, your symptoms should be under control. If they give you a drug that doesn't suppress those specific pathways, that's when the drug doesn't work. Eventually, your body will, after five to seven years, build antibodies in almost most cases, and then you won't be able to use the drug anyway. So, they've got to change you to another drug to try to suppress those pathways all over again. So, there's a lot of complexity around these drugs, and obviously a laundry list. In case you were wondering, that was a list of 201 side effects present amongst the five most common drugs, which I actually listed somewhere on my sheet. Yes, Remicade, Humira, Stelara, Intivio, and Skyrizzy are your five most common medications, per statistics, right now used in the USA. And they come with a total combined list of 201 potential side effects marked, known, understood, and self-reported. Here's the thing. I'm not anti-drug, but there's a lot more caution that we need to throw at them. The problem is, it's the only solution doctors have next to surgery, so they just, here, have at her. But there are some benefits, okay? I'm not going to lie to you. There are some good benefits of biologics. One, they're going to get you immediate relief. Well, I failed to spell relief on the board. That's okay. That says relief. Don't worry about it. So, it says a lot of things. Short-term use is what they should be used for, but they can provide immediate and very powerful relief of your symptoms, right? They can also allow you to have a bit more flexibility when it comes down to dealing with your root causes and really getting to what's causing your bowel disease. So, if you're dealing with something, for example, you're dealing with a mold, or a parasitic infection, or a fungal overgrowth, or neurological issues, or latent viral infections, or something your body can't fight off, biologics can give you a very real, very, let's say, a good leg up, right? Use this for example. If I got into a motorcycle accident, my arm flew off, I don't want lavender oil, right? Give me the drugs. Put me under anesthesia. Give me as much of a powerful thing as you need in order to help me sew and stitch and put things back together so I can then heal. That's the way I see biologics, right? And of course, they can induce total remission, which is a good idea. It sounds good in theory, right? Remission sounds great. Who doesn't want to be symptom-free? Of course. Here's the problem. You're dependent on the medication to control your immune system. The issue is we've never asked, what is your immune system reacting to? We know that inflammation, in all cases, all the symptoms you're experiencing, inflammation is simply your body trying to heal you from something. It is your body reacting in an attempt to defend you from, protect you from, or heal you from something that shouldn't be there, or something that's gone wrong. The issue is there are stages to bowel disease, and your immune system becomes hyper-reactive because it's been there so long, or there's been underlying imbalances, and now your body is dealing with what it's dealing with. But along with the benefits, of course, right? Immediate relief allows you to get to those root causes, giving you some time to figure things out, can put you into remission. There are obviously some risks, and we're just going to call them cons. So the cons we're dealing with. You're likely to build antibodies, right? That happens, and it's not like, oh, you come off the drug, you'll get antibodies. I've had people come to see me who built antibodies within two weeks of dealing with these drugs. They went on them, boom, antibodies, now they're having problems. Others, commonly, five to seven years, and you've got to change your drug again. So that five to seven year window of relief, your total or partial relief you've experienced is gone. You've got to try a new one, throw a dart at the board and hope the next drug works. And new drugs mean new side effects, that list of 201 things, right? There's no guarantees that they're going to work. On top of that, they are extremely expensive. Some people are paying for their insurance $10,000 to $20,000 per month for these bloody drugs, whether it's infusions or injections or whatever it is. It's a crazy amount of money, $10,000 to $20,000. You can spend up to a quarter million dollars a year just suppressing your immune system instead of asking why. Another issue that we run into is it's one of the only tools your doctors have. Their tools are medication and surgery. You go through the drugs, if it doesn't work, oh well. You try the prednisone, you try the budesonide, you try whatever steroids they give you and you're going through biologics next. That's the only tools in the toolkit. And again, we have a massive list of side effects. I just gave you 201 and I ran a list of the top 10. It expands out to 230, 240 potential side effects of the top 10 most common biologics used in the USA right now. I believe there's a total of 11. So it's quite extensive. And again, your doctors, they have two tools because they are under the false impression about bowel disease. I have broken down the research, I have looked at it extensively, I now have the pleasure of teaching on it, lecturing on it, working with doctors on it and we're trying to change a narrative. But we got a 40-50 year narrative being built behind this, if not going back closer to 75 years, where it's believed to be an autoimmune, genetic and random, known as idiopathic condition. We don't know what's causing it. None of this is true. And I'm not going to go into detail on this one, but I want to make the point, because I've done many talks about this. I went through and brought out the top nine most common antibodies that we see, top 10 most common antibodies we see in Crohn's colitis, zero or auto. There's no strict evidence saying, yep, these attack your own tissues. A lot of reasons they can be there. And very few have we actually seen them attacking your own tissues. In fact, there had been autoantibodies. So there's antibodies which attack bad guys, there's auto which turn around and attack you. And there has been some really funny stuff that's come through. There's certain antibodies like ASCA or OMPC, these are antibodies that were said, oh, they're autoantibodies. For years, that was accepted. The reason they called them auto is because they were already assuming Crohn's colitis is autoimmune. They found these antibodies there and said, oh, they must be attacking you. No further research needed, done. Many years later, it came out and we said, oh, yeah, no, it turns out they're not attacking you. They're attacking a yeast or an E. coli protein or something else. So there's no autoantibodies. Genes do not cause the disease. There are weak links and susceptibilities, yes. But something else has to make that chain break. If it's a weak link, what pulled it? And then, of course, to say there's no known causes, asinine. We've seen cases increase by 3,000% in the last 75 years. We know stress and mold and environments and toxins and microbes and viruses and fungi and all these things can create bowel disease. So to tell me there's no known cause is stupid. You're just not looking. So the whole narrative is blind. It's none of these things. So if you're assuming your body's attacking yourself, there's no reason why. It's just bad luck of the drop on your genes. Of course, your only tools are cut the bowel out or suppress your immune system. That's what you rely on. When you realize those don't make sense, when you realize that the data just doesn't add up, suddenly you go, wait a minute, what are my alternatives? What other options do I have outside of this gigantic, massive, nasty list of side effects? Look at this bloody thing. Now, yeah, I double spaced them for dramatic effect, but you get the idea, right? It's 201 side effects. It's crazy. So let's talk about alternatives. Because sometimes alternatives do exist. Sometimes they do not. And there's a reason we're having this conversation. I'm not anti-drug. I am anti-long-term drug use is the only solution. Because that's nonsense. I know better. And now you know better. If you haven't seen my YouTube videos, my podcast, Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally, if you haven't seen those yet, dive into it. It's going to blow you away. You're going to see immediately. It just doesn't make sense. There's no way that these conditions can just be random autoimmune genetic conditions. Once you understand that, your life's going to change. I promise you. So let's talk about our alternatives. We know there are alternatives to these biologics, of course, right? There are other drugs they can use. They can put you on things like ASA or five ASAs like mesalamine. They can use steroids like prednisone, budesonide. But these aren't for long-term. Mesalamine is pretty okay to use. You might know it by other names as well. That's fine. But mesalamine is the most common word. Steroids, again, they're not made for long-term use. You can cause all kinds of issues, healing response issues. You can cause adrenal dysfunction. You name it when we're dealing with steroids. A lot of negative side effects. So when we're talking about alternatives, what I'm talking about is going outside of the realm of pharmaceuticals. These are great for short-term. I've told clients, I've recommended, go get the drugs. Things are so severe. Your quality of life is so compromised. You try to swallow a pill and in 15 minutes that whole pill is in the toilet bowl. Get the drugs. Nothing wrong with that, right? You're in a very severe, life-altering, life-changing circumstance where you need the medication to control it so we can get in there. Try performing surgery on somebody who's rolling around and writhing in pain on the table. It's going to be horribly unsuccessful. So same concept when we're dealing with someone who's so inflamed, whose immune system is so overrun, who needs so much help. In these cases, then we can, let's say, go to the drugs. Not a problem. It'll give us a little bit of leeway and time to get to the roots and figure out what's going on. Because there's a lot of primary drivers. We understand that there are certain pathways of your immune system commonly overdone, commonly overrun in IBD. We can make some very basic changes. And I'm going to say some things here. You might go, oh duh. Hear me out. Let me finish the whole bit before you just judge it's kind of too stupid and too simple. I promise you that, okay? So first is going to be your central nervous system. Stress responses we know are prime drivers. The issue is a lot of people come in and go, yeah, I had a stressful event that caused my IBD. Probably not. In fact, I had a woman I spoke to recently. I talked about her story fairly recently. She came in to see me. She said, oh, I got COVID and then I got colitis. That was my trigger. Well, of course you think that would be your trigger, right? You got the COVID flu. And then shortly after that, you got colitis. A plus B equals C. Sure. But I said, it doesn't make sense. How many people do you know who got that same flu? How many people do you know who got that same virus? Went through that same stressful event, whatever it is, and didn't get sick? Who didn't get colitis? So we peeled back the layers and said, tell me about where you were born. Were you breastfed, bottle fed? That's the first seeding of your microbiome. Got it. And turns out she was bottle fed. She was born in a very poor town in Columbia, back in the 80s. And so she was dealing with a lot of mold in her system. And she had a lot of mold in the home. So that caused a lot of infections, which led to tonsillitis, led to ear infections, led to belly issues. She was given tons of antibiotics, which led to UTIs, which led to more antibiotics. So her whole gut microbiome is already completely disrupted. And now she's living through the 1980s through Columbia. So if you're familiar with Pablo Escobar and the Cali cartel, now we got bombs going off in the streets. She said, if mom didn't come home by 6 p.m., there's a good chance she was dead. That's what she lived with until she was a teenager. And then she moved away. And all these layers of chronic stress and antibiotics and all this prior damage led to the point where COVID was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. So when you're doing your own history and talking about your nervous system, I went through a stressful event. What made you so susceptible where that stressful event led to this issue? I spoke to another woman recently, and she had gone through, she had a bunch of teeth removed and implants done, and she was on antibiotics before, during, and after her oral surgery. And then she was taking Advil, two to three Advils a day for about 30 days. And she got colitis. She started bleeding, went to the doctor, they did scopes and said, yep, it's colitis. I think they gave her ulcerative colitis as a formal diagnosis. Got it. She said, yep, it was the Advil and antibiotics. I said, wait a minute, that could do it. That could be enough. Let's peel back the layers a little bit. Let's go back further and further. Went all the way back to childhood. Well, she was born around St. Louis, Missouri. She's got a whole bunch of siblings who have had cancer, who have died of cancer. Went all the way back to St. Louis, Missouri. Well, 1940s, 1950s was a Manhattan project. A bunch of nuclear waste being spilled. So her whole family's got cancers and everybody around her, it's a cancer cluster. So we see DNA damage. We see mitochondrial damage. We see immune systems already compromised. That's number one. Then she went through a lot of stress in her lifetime. A fair bit of antibiotics. It was something like 70 doses before she was 40 years old. And then her house burned down in the 90s and family death and stress and all these things until she had surgery. And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not saying you have to go through gangland with Pablo Escobar or have your house burned down and be born in Cancer Alley to have predisposing factors. We're talking about your nervous system. All of those stressors and the biological components led to this last woman's issues. Now, if you've had a lifetime of stress, trauma, PTSD, complex PTSD, yes, that can be the trigger because it decreases your immune system. It causes other issues. So we're talking about looking into alternatives. We have to understand there are layers that led to you getting this disease. It just simply takes the right questions and the right placement to understand what made your system weak enough where COVID caused colitis, where Advil caused colitis, where this thing caused you this disease. And since we have to go through for alternatives. Now, there are some other things blow your mind a little bit here. I have a gentleman. I'm working with young kids, 16 years old, and his was mold. His original issue was mold. And that causes a lot of histamine responses. Typically, he's got parasitic infections involved, which typically cause histamine issues. And because of all this, he's not been sleeping. He's waking up 10 times a night to go to the bathroom. So his nervous system is overrun. These three things, parasites, mold, and chronic stress drive up histamine pathways. So he was off the drugs. He wasn't sure what to do. And his gut was flaring up. He's got cramps. You know what I gave him? Let's sneak in front of the board. Watch this. I gave him one Benadryl pill. Symptoms went away. Now, I should correct that. He took one Benadryl pill, 50 milligrams, as a 16-year-old male, took 50 milligrams a night for four nights. Three weeks later, his symptoms are still gone because it was histamines. We just need to regulate them a little bit. Now, I've put him on quercetin and stinging nettle, 500 to 1,000 milligrams of each morning and night. And that's controlling his histamines, his mast cells. They're called mast cell stabilizers. You can use other things like vitamin C, NAC, perilla oils, all kinds of stuff to stabilize mast cells. But histamines are a major driver in IBD. It's going to sound nuts, but if the drugs aren't working, I tell my clients, try Benadryl. Just let me know how it feels. Benadryl didn't work? Go to Claritin, loratadine is the generic name. Give it a shot. Let me know how it works. And then, once those symptoms are controlled, because if the drugs aren't doing it, now we can start to look to those root causes. I'm going to show you what those steps are, and then we're going to get to questions. If you have any questions, now is a good time to drop them in the chat. I answer them first or basis. So, after we've gone through your history, we understand what's going on. This is the alternative side. Medications manage your symptoms. The alternative, quote alternative, anyway, the alternative side is saying, let's go through and figure out the root. The analogy I've been using, I'll take this one to the grave with me. Imagine you step on a nail, goes to your foot, your doctor looks at you and says, yep, it's just genetic. There's nothing we can do. It's part of your body now. I'm going to give you numbing cream for the rest of your life, and if that doesn't help the pain, I'll cut your foot off. It's that kind of nonsense. Rather than your doctor coming to you and going, oh yeah, there's clearly a reason why your foot's inflamed and in pain. I can see it. I've identified it. Let's remove the nail, clean the wound, and give your body the time and resources it needs to heal. If we apply the same philosophy to bowel disease and look through the cracks of the assumption of autoimmune genetic and random, look at the antibodies. They assume they were auto. They're not. Once we can see through this, then we get you to the root causes. We can begin reversing, and it looks like five simple steps. I'll correct it. Six. The first is drainage. Now, I'm not going through a lot of this right now, because I've done full videos on just these five things, but drainage is the process of emptying your cup. Detoxing is gathering your trash. Drainage is bringing it out to the curb. So, we need to open up your exit doors, your liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, lymphatic system, skin, bowel, sinuses, kidneys, etc. to get things out of your system. That's the first way. If you have a cup that is brimming with water, any little bump or jump is going to cause it to spill. You go into a flare right away. If your cup is full, a little bit of stress causes you to flare. The more we can empty your cup, the more room you have to wiggle around without spilling, the more room you have to get stressed, or the more room you have to miss a bad night's sleep, whatever it is, and you're not going to flare. So, we need to give your immune system room by draining, and then we go through the five R process, which again, I'm skimming now, but if you need this, send me a DM. I'll get you more info on it. I've got videos on it. I've got podcasts on it. Straightforward. Remove the root cause. That's the first R. Identify your roots. Are you in a currently moldy environment? Are you currently under stress? Are you currently, currently, currently? What are the things right now driving your disease? Let's remove them. It's that simple. And then, we can go through and start to replenish missing nutrients and lifestyle quality, sleep, etc. Your body needs to heal. We can repair and rebuild the gut lining, gut microbiome, and then we can rejuvenate, meaning rebalance your immune system. And this is a process to getting you better. Because you have to understand, last point, I'm going to get to questions here. IBD, Crohn's colitis, even diverticulitis, it's a process of really four steps and stages of your immune system becoming active. Now, there are two ways you get IBD, either seemingly overnight, a couple of days, weeks, or months, and boom, I took ibuprofen for 30 days and got colitis. The other way is as long progressive, like some people, I had some constipation growing up, then I went to constipation, diarrhea, and then I was on medication for this and that. And eventually, my bowels wore and tore until it became colitis. There are four steps. Number one is going to be your acute stage. That's one. That's like stomach flu, whatever it is, like your body comes in, you get rid of it, but you can't. So now, it becomes a chronic condition. Not necessarily chronic bleeding or chronic inflammation, but chronic something as a wear and tear. Picture wearing a pair of shoes with no sock and your heels wearing out, and eventually, it then bleeds. That's that chronic, chronic process. Then we have the next stage, which we're calling immune mediated. And I didn't just make this up. The Crohn's colitis foundation, the Mayo Clinic have recently downgraded Crohn's colitis from autoimmune to immune mediated. This means instead of you having one bad day, that's acute, you shake it off, you're good. Chronic stress eventually gets to you until one day you snap and you just punch your best friend in the mouth. That is an over reaction. That is an immune mediated response in your system. And then the fourth stage is where we're seeing either immunodeficiency, or you could call it dysfunction, where now we're seeing things like SERS, or chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or MCAS, which is mass cell activation syndrome, or arguably, possibly true autoimmunity, which is a very gray area, which I don't believe is actually a real thing in IBD. I'm challenging the concept in other conditions, but that's 10 years down the road. Four steps. Most of you with IBD are going to be here, stage three, immune mediated. Your immune system is overreacting right now. You just have to calm it down and get it to chill. Going through D in five hours. Drain, remove, replenish, repair, rebuild, and rejuvenate. And that's what it looks like to fix a bowel disease. I'm going to go over the questions right now. And here's the thing. This is making sense to you. We're ringing some bells. You can do one simple thing to get yourself some help right now and start the reversal process. It's really easy and attached to it. There are no obligations. There are no sales tactics. There is nothing, just a conversation. If you're watching on YouTube and listening on the podcast, the steps are very easy. Down below, there's a link in the show notes. You can simply just click that, schedule a call with me, and they'll talk to me directly. Maybe if this is years down the road, one of my team, but right now I'm doing the calls myself. We'll take your history. We'll go through, figure out where it's coming from and what you need to get better. And we go from there. Let's turn over to the questions. Moria says, I've never used biologics and never will. It's very brave, very bold. Nothing wrong with that. Look, you don't want to use biologics. Great. I can't tell you legally what to do when it comes to medication. I will not tell you to come off drugs. I will not tell you to use them or not to use them. Talk to your doctor in all circumstances. I am not your doctor. But here's the thing. What I can say is that for me, knowing what I know about how reversible this condition is, about how root causes are a very prevalent issue. I know that if my quality of life was so compromised, I couldn't function day to day, couldn't keep food down. I'm on the brink of death. Give me the drugs. I will wrestle with the side effects before I wrestle with death itself. That's a risk I'm willing to take. But if it's like, you know what, I'm uncomfortable. I got cramping, diarrhea a few times a day or constipation. I can manage. I'm not taking the drugs because I know way too much about this disease at this stage. After over 500 people we've seen in my practice now just for Crohn's colitis, reversing these diseases, I know way too much to just rely on the drugs as the only solution. And I hope you guys pick that information up too. That's all we got for you for tonight. Thank you guys so much for being here. It's always a pleasure. Talk to 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.