Following Your Gut Podcast #16, The Art of Healing Your Gut

Episode Summary:

In this illuminating episode of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, Roland Pankewich takes listeners on a deep dive into the world of dysbiosis, a complex and multifaceted issue affecting gut health. He challenges listeners to rethink their understanding of this umbrella term, highlighting the nuances and individualistic nature of dysbiosis presentations in patients. By infusing philosophical and conceptual perspectives with established scientific insights, Roland crafts a comprehensive discussion that pushes the boundaries of traditional treatments.

Roland articulates the reasons behind the challenges faced while diagnosing and treating dysbiosis, emphasizing the variability and uniqueness of each case. Key SEO topics include “dysbiosis treatment,” “gut microbiome health,” and “individualized healthcare.” He stresses the importance of considering the body’s broader ecological and energetic patterns and how these might align with or influence gut health. From critiquing the limitations of current diagnostic sensitivity to the importance of personalized treatment protocols, Roland provides a holistic approach to restoring gut eubiosis.

Key Takeaways:

Understanding Dysbiosis: Dysbiosis represents an imbalance in the gut microbiome, which may include bacterial, fungal, parasitic, or archaic imbalances.

Individual Variability: No two dysbiosis cases are alike; each requires a personalized approach considering the individual’s unique health profile.

Diagnostic Limitations: Current tests only provide a snapshot of the gut’s state and might not capture the full picture, requiring practitioners to consider the broader context.

Holistic Approaches: Successful treatment often combines traditional and alternative medical insights, focusing on restoring the body’s overall balance and terrain.

Time and Patience: The path to rectifying dysbiosis often necessitates a long-term commitment and a phased approach, respecting the body’s natural healing processes.

About the Host:

Roland Pankewich is the host of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, where he delves into the intersection of health science and clinical wisdom. With a keen focus on the intricate dynamics of gut health, particularly dysbiosis, Roland brings his wealth of knowledge to listeners who are keen on understanding the nuances of gut microbiome health. Offering a blend of philosophical reflections and scientific insights, Roland aims to revolutionize how individuals and practitioners perceive and treat gut-related issues.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:03 Understanding Dysbiosis and Its Complexities in Gut Health
• 4:04 Personalized Approaches in Dysbiosis Treatment
• 5:56 Understanding Dysbiosis: Causes, Treatment, and Healing Timeframes
• 13:21 Balancing Diagnostic Tests and Bioenergetic Medicine for Optimal Health
• 20:02 20:02 Understanding Dysbiosis Through Lifestyle and Nervous System Regulation
• 24:29 24:29 Exploring Health Practices and Provoking Thoughtful Collaboration

Transcript

0:00:03 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. I have a question for you. Have you heard this word dysbiosis? And obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve certainly heard the word dysbiosis. But my deeper question is, do you really know what it means? Have you sat and examined all the nuance of how dysbiosis can present itself, even how it’s created in the first place?

0:00:32 Roland Pankewich: I want to have a little bit of a different episode today. Today I want to talk a little bit more philosophically, conceptually, while honoring what has been elucidated about this all encompassing word of gut microbiome health, and maybe put forth some considerations or some theories that may help us better understand dysbiosis, possibly even understand why the limitations of treating dysbiosis often yield low quality results and relapses for people due to the fact that diagnostic sensitivity and what we’re really trying to look for might not be able to be sampled in real time for quite some time yet.

0:01:10 Roland Pankewich: So if we’re going to talk about something, we should probably define it. I’m describing or defining dysbiosis as the imbalance in the ecology, in the ecosystem of the microbes and other organisms living inside of the human body that create a dysbiotic state, meaning the quality of health and symbiosis is compromised, creating a environment that is not suitable to cooperation between the microbes, parasites, fungi, all the things that live inside of us, and us the host.

0:01:52 Roland Pankewich: It’s a very long and fancy way for saying the terrain of our forest is barren and the creatures living in there are not necessarily native or optimized to the ecosystem. Dysbiosis is an umbrella term that gets thrown around to describe this, but if you dive deeper into the nuance of what can represent dysbiosis, you’ll come to find that it’s rather nuanced. Most people are assumingly saying dysbiosis referring to bacterial imbalance or overgrowths, but technically you can have a bacterial dysbiosis, you can have a fungal dysbiosis, you can have a parasitic dysbiosis, you can have archaic dysbiosis, and if you can have one, you can have some combination of all four, two, three.

0:02:43 Roland Pankewich: So it really is the ecosystem being disrupted due to the fact that a the ecosystem is in a prime state to harbor the overgrowth of a species or multiple species that cause further deterioration to the ecosystem and thus cause the body to negatively react and try to find and restore balance to what once was. This is why dysbiosis is so complicated to treat. Because technically, each case of dysbiosis and each individual who presents it will be its own unique case.

0:03:17 Roland Pankewich: And I have been talking about this in both the monthly webinars that we do and in other episodes that no two situations of the same diagnosis are ever the same set of parameters or same presentation. And I think this is why a lot of people get frustrated, both trying to take it on by themselves and also as practitioners. Because in many ways, we have predetermined, predefined protocols or plans for treating dysbiosis that are usually either an amalgamation of what research papers have said in isolated conditions and gathering them together, or what previous successes and the protocols that have been generated from those previous successes have done for someone, therefore they should do for someone else.

0:04:04 Roland Pankewich: And me saying that, I’m not saying you should throw the baby out with a bathwater here and say there are no protocols or there are no hard and defined ways of guaranteeing some degree of success. All I’m saying is the consideration for the individual as a unique person has to come before anything else when one wants to embark upon the treatment of dealing with something like dysbiosis. Because there are many tools of the trade.

0:04:29 Roland Pankewich: There are probiotics, there are antimicrobial herbs, there are antimicrobial agents. Things like magnesium oxide, hydrogen peroxide can even be used. There are a variety of different gut stimulating and motility stimulating aspects. There’s binders, there’s all these different things. And trying to figure out what combination of products works for the person in front of you really is where the practice of healthcare becomes more of an art than it does a science. The science is the understanding that a protocol was created by logic due to a set of variables that has either been validated with past success or makes sense based upon what you are assessing and theorizing here.

0:05:14 Roland Pankewich: But ultimately that the individual and their response is going to be the guiding principle to the degree of success. And if you have been able to eradicate the problem for them and they have maintained their new state of health in an ongoing way or an ongoing fashion. There’s a thing I think a lot of people miss about considering dysbiosis, and that is simply how long that state has been someone’s reality. And what I mean by that is the average person who experiences a dysbiotic condition did not develop said condition over the course of a weekend. I’m sure in a weekend you could worsen a scenario of Dysbiosis.

0:05:56 Roland Pankewich: But most people who have been suffering from gut issues have probably had those issues in lesser degrees of manifestation over the course of months, more likely years. There’s a model that I often teach about, which is a concept of looking at how the body gets sick in sort of an order of operations. I believe that when there is a disruption to the system, many a time that disruption can be a subtle, insidious thing.

0:06:27 Roland Pankewich: Subtle in the sense that it’s not very overt and obvious from a feeling perspective, unless someone is highly, highly in tune with themself, and insidious in the sense that it develops underneath the surface unbeknownst to the person who’s going to present the symptom. I think most scenarios that create long held dysbiosis develop this way. And they develop this way to the point where they become very ingrained as a physiologic pattern inside a person’s digestive system system, which is why they become very recalcitrant to be treated, because they have had time to really root in the microbiome and become the fixture of how the microbiome is presenting itself.

0:07:06 Roland Pankewich: Because the microbiome is the terrain that’s able to house certain species. And if over time the quality of the terrain breaks down, then that microbiome actually is no longer capable of harboring healthy bacteria. We which is why the state of dysbiosis exists in the first place. Because I believe dysbiosis can only exist where there is an environment that can support its life. And that environment at the same time will not actually be able to harbor a healthy profile of microbes because they cannot align with the diseased terrain.

0:07:40 Roland Pankewich: Second thing about treating dysbiosis in this context is the expectation has to be set that if it’s a long held thing, then path of treatment is probably not going to be a week long course of anything. But it’s going to be more of an unlayering of an onion as your body starts to be able to work in conjunction with your immune system to be able to eradicate, push out these certain microbes while you’re able to regenerate the terrain which can flush in, not flush in, flushing in is the bacteria coming in from the probiotics, but usher in the microbes that can replace the dysbiotic ones because you’ve made a healthier terrain that can harbor the environment.

0:08:23 Roland Pankewich: I really do like using analogies and metaphors. And when someone’s trying to regenerate dead woodlands or dead forest or rainforest, there is a certain amount of time that nature takes to fully be able to restore what was damaged in 1986 in Chernobyl, when the nuclear power plant, essentially the reactor core, melted down, it wreaked havoc in the local environment and pushed all organic life out of the environment for the better part of 30 plus years.

0:08:57 Roland Pankewich: But where there was once a thriving city, now sits ruins. So the humans have been dispersed, but nature has regenerated and all of the ecosystem has slowly returned back to finding its balance. And, and what was once inhabitable has now become rife with natural life due to the fact that enough time has elapsed for the earth to heal itself. In that context, I believe the human digestive system has a very similar pattern under much shorter time constraints to where when everything can harmonize properly, you can get rid of the microbes and the bacteria that have been there in long standing, when the person is healthy and strong enough to do so. And, and when you can recondition the digestive system, you can improve the overall balance of ph, the overall quantity of nutrient and mineral depletion in the body, and improve the digestive system and overall quality of life for that person.

0:09:54 Roland Pankewich: Then the nature of that person’s life is reflective of healthy habits that can then mirror themselves in the ability to regenerate the ecosystem and thus eradicate the dysbiosis, restoring eubiosis to the gut. That explanation bakes in that there is a process of time where there might have to be periods focused on the eradication, then periods restored, periods focused on the restoration, periods restored on the nourishment, and then periods restored on focusing the seeding of what goes through the digestive system, and then another round of the start again, which might require some more eradication.

0:10:39 Roland Pankewich: So that’s why dysbiosis is such a challenging thing, because there are so many different ways to approach it. But if we have a framework of, I think, aligning the patterns of nature, knowing that we are interconnected with that, and we are part and parcel of being beholden to the same laws, the same natural laws, it might change the understanding that a, the expectation is the average person who’s not feeling good wants to feel good instantaneously understand that.

0:11:07 Roland Pankewich: But they have to understand that the responsibility that they’ve created to themselves is if they’ve let this thing happen over the course of years, it is going to have to reverse engineer itself back to a better state over the course of weeks, months, if not years. And I can experience, rather I can speak to that from some of my own experience. Where I had to take a course of doxycycline one time.

0:11:33 Roland Pankewich: And in some ways I can say my. My system has never felt the same since I have dramatically improved my overall state. It’s taken years to figure out what patterns and what things are there that influence the overall state of well being. So I can consistently work on regenerating my health and not trigger what may actually cause a slight regression in my own digestive wellness. Because once the gut has been compromised, the gut can be compromised again, unless we really dial into what works for us as an individual.

0:12:11 Roland Pankewich: Some cases, dysbiosis does start in other ways. So what I just laid out was this idea of an insidious, slow path of development to the point where the symptoms become so obvious, the person can’t deal with their existence because their quality of life is so compromised. In other scenarios, it may be something rather more acute. A trip that resulted in some severe food poisoning, something they ate. They never felt the same again. It could even be brought on by a critical life event that was extremely stressful to the person physically, mentally, emotionally, chemically.

0:12:50 Roland Pankewich: And in these scenarios, the nice thing is it might be something that is more acutely treatable, but it is not necessarily something that is going to be eradicated instantaneously as it was brought on, because the body’s dysbiosis presentation is ultimately a compensation to try to hold things together. The hard part about assessing dysbiosis really does lie in the quality of our diagnostic sensitivity.

0:13:21 Roland Pankewich: What I mean by diagnostic sensitivity is the tests that we run and the information that they elucidate oftentimes has to really be sat with and examined in context. And what I mean by that is because we have been conditioned as a society to go to a medical professional, we get a test, and all of the decisions are based upon the information that comes back from that test. The assumption is that that test represents all of reality.

0:13:51 Roland Pankewich: My feel is that test, or the information in any test represents a moment in time. And there’s an old saying that says it takes two data points to make a trend. What naturopathic, functional and various medical practices that have adopted these diagnostic labs have done is they have oftentimes either led the consumer through, through no one’s direct intention and manipulation, but they’ve led the consumer to believe that the keys to answering all their questions lie in a stool test or a urine test or whatever.

0:14:30 Roland Pankewich: And I can say from previous experience, and also sitting with looking at things and analyzing things in context, that what comes out of you in a stool sample or a urine sample or what have you is whatever information the body was able to release or chose to release is a better way of describing it that day. And it doesn’t mean that whatever comes back on a test is at all representative of what actually exists inside of you in real time.

0:14:59 Roland Pankewich: So whatever bacteria come back, whatever parasites, ovum, whatever fungus shows itself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the thing that you have to treat and the solution is there. And this is a hard thing for a lot of people to stomach because it takes away the black and white nature of diagnosis and treatment and it puts you back into a state of the gray of, well, this is what’s being shown, but what is there that we can’t diagnose?

0:15:26 Roland Pankewich: And the ultimate reality is the sensitivity limitations of our current diagnostics that are widely available to people are just not able to go inside someone’s microbiome in real time and start identifying people like facial recognition does in an airport, for example, or retinal scanning or thumbprint scanning. We do not have the ability to know what is actually happening in real time. And oftentimes when we treat the information that comes out from the test.

0:15:57 Roland Pankewich: On a good day we get a great result, on a bad day, we get no change. Or if anything we can make it worse because we haven’t considered all the things that may be able to be tolerated by the person, I. E. Sometimes antimicrobials, antifungals, what have you can actually be a very stressful thing for the person’s body to deal with if they don’t have enough energy or they don’t have enough adaptability or bandwidth of tolerance for the stresses that come from killing organisms inside the body.

0:16:28 Roland Pankewich: So then you ask, well, what is the solution? How can we verify these things objectively? Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. And there is a little bit of a philosophical difference of opinion when it comes to certain practitioners. And I’ve, I’ve studied both of these and I think there’s value in both of them, but I also think they’re highly incomplete as a perspective. So in the functional medicine style world, you do a diagnostic, you get your information and you select the protocol based upon, as I mentioned before, past success, experience, or an amalgamation of products based upon the logic of what the research says.

0:17:08 Roland Pankewich: Again, it’s a great starting point. How do you know that those products are going to be well tolerated by that person? You can’t really test that ahead of time. You either have to give someone a protocol and have Good faith that the outcome is going to be well tolerated and successful. Or you can start to bring in a little bit of the world of bioenergetic medicine that allows you to have a greater ability to test not the functional capacity of a product in the person’s body in real time via the assessment of the biochemistry, but looking at the resonance of how a product might align itself with someone’s energy field via the process of either muscle testing, electronic acupuncture testing, or there are other devices that have the ability to take the energetic signature of the product and then match it with the signature of the person to create either a harmonious outcome, yes, this product relates well with this person, or no, this product has a negative resonance with the person.

0:18:17 Roland Pankewich: So even though it might be the thing that the logic or the paper that you read says, it might actually be a bad product for that specific individual. Why that is important is I’ve seen time and time again anecdotal evidence of success with this style of pairing products with people, because otherwise you’re just using what your brain says or what your knowledge base can come up with. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily right.

0:18:45 Roland Pankewich: It just means it might have been better optimized. Could you have blend both worlds together, doing a good quality diagnostic and also determining what that person’s body, microbiome and ultimately potential path of success would best select for? And that part is really for the clinicians to consider. If you are finding yourself having a hard time finding success with various strategies or protocol implementations, sometimes blending the best of both worlds might be a great strategy for the ultimate best outcome for your patients.

0:19:26 Roland Pankewich: And this kind of brings us to the last aspect of dysbiosis. And I think understanding why it’s there in the first place, from a practical perspective is probably something that is lost in the deep focus of what we’re looking at, focusing solely on the gut. I alluded to it a little bit in the. The initial aspects of introducing things. Dysbiosis can only be created in a body where the terrain can harbor the dysbiosis because the environment is best synced to that.

0:20:02 Roland Pankewich: You know, there’s a, in biological medicine, there’s an old philosophical, I guess, theory that you attract the parasites, the microbes, the fungus, and the various things that are actually showing up to take on the burden of what your body can no longer do. So if you’re not digesting your food, you’re going to bring in organisms that are going to completely digest that food. So you’re not left with rotting stuff in your intestines. And the side effect is they start to overgrow and they start to throw off the populations.

0:20:32 Roland Pankewich: A body that’s healthy has certain aspects and signatures to it. You know, in the world of physics, a healthy cell has a millivolt charge of negative 70 to negative 90 millivolts, which basically means that a high quantity of electrons flowing through the system in each individual cell. A healthy body will have optimized TH ranges because temperature and ph are the two major influences which catalyze enzyme activity in the body. And everything biochemical is determined by enzymatic activity.

0:21:10 Roland Pankewich: So if inside of your digestive system, you have issues with inflammation, you have issues with ph dysregulation, then it’s impossible to have a healthy microbiome where there is a dysfunctional place where all these chemical reactions are taking place. Other aspects of healthy people, they’re well hydrated, they look a certain way. You can look at the quality of someone’s skin and someone’s eyes, and you can get a sense of how healthy they are. Because the quality of the skin is often reflective of the quality of the gut as health overall, because the cells are very interconnected.

0:21:47 Roland Pankewich: You know, the quality of someone’s lifestyle who has a healthy gut is probably vastly different from someone who doesn’t. Someone who regulates their circadian rhythm, someone who has a good quality of sun exposure, external environment exposure, connecting in with the earth and also managing the stress level. I personally believe that most people’s dysbiosis come from dysregulated nervous system activity that fragments the body’s ability to communicate with itself. Because we have a brain and a spinal cord, that’s our central nervous system.

0:22:22 Roland Pankewich: We have an autonomic nervous system that controls the function of each organ based upon internal and external reactions and environment influences. And then we have an enteric nervous system, which is the nervous system of the gut that communicates with the rest of the body. If this communication in the body is fragmented due to any kind of stress, then the path of dysbiosis and gut issues is not a question of if, it’s a question of when. To me, it becomes an almost absolute certainty.

0:22:51 Roland Pankewich: And this is the area of helping someone rehab their dysbiosis in their gut. That I think is underutilized and under considered because the things that often help us heal are not always things that directly focus on the area of the body that is compromised. If you have someone who’s a ball of stress and they live in the city center, they work in a high rise tower and you move them to a beach for five to seven days.

0:23:19 Roland Pankewich: Well, their environment is totally different. They’re connected in with the earth. They’re in an area that has an unconscious influence on their nervous system down regulating stress. You’re likely going to see that their digestive system works a lot better. And that is the thing that needs to be paired with the logical, intuitive framework, whatever way you want to label and examine it, framework of treatment.

0:23:46 Roland Pankewich: Because dysbiosis is not necessarily a single thing to a single person. So I hope this exposes conceptual examination paired with a little bit of scientific validity and some personal thoughts and musings was something that was useful to you all, something that elucidated either greater degrees of critical thinking in your world or made you want to potentially consider a more vast, expansive way of treating someone, possibly collaborating with another professional or seeking out a different type of, of health practice if what you have been trying has been yielding no success.

0:24:29 Roland Pankewich: We make the best quality products we possibly can and we have an incredible amount of testimonial from a massive client base who has experienced incredible results with what it is we do. But each individual person has a different journey and a different story and a different result based upon what they’re trying to focus on. And what I’m trying to do with this information is to provoke thought and to provoke the development of thought for the betterment of not only your own health, but the health of anyone that you may come in contact with, be it the advice that you can give them or the quality of the treatment that you can provide if you are a professional.

0:25:09 Roland Pankewich: As always, it’s an absolute joy to be able to express on this platform. I thank you all for the opportunity to do so and we will be continuing to be providing not only the best quality information that I can generate. We have some really incredible guests coming up, specialists in the field of naturopathy, bioenergetic medicine, and some old guests from the past who will probably make their way back.

0:25:33 Roland Pankewich: So I hope you’re all having a wonderful week, you have a wonderful end to the summer, and we’ll see you next time on the following youg Gut podcast. Thanks again, everyone.