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Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Part 1)
by Stephen Macallan, MBAcC, MAMH

This embarrassing and common complaint has many different causes and here I will outline a number of related and complex causes.

The large intestine and small intestine perform their various tasks of nutrition, absorption and waste disposal with the help of micro-organisms - zillions of them, and there are different groups/types of micro-organisms in different sections of the bowel. These bacteria process the food we eat and thus enable us to extract nourishment from the processed material. A very common situation is that a person may have an insufficient number of these beneficial bacteria. Tthis allows opportunistic and hostile microbes to gain a foothold amongst the bowel flora. Once these hostile micro-organisms have established a niche in the bowel ecology it can be very difficult to dislodge them.

There are a number of reasons why we become deficient in beneficial bacteria. This loss begins with lack of breast-feeding ~ breast-fed babies (6 months or more) develop the correct micro-flora in the bowel, whereas bottle-fed babies tend to develop a different set of micro-organisms. Antibiotics used for say, a chest infection, kill, not only the chest infection bacteria but also bacteria throughout the system indiscriminately, especially in the bowel and it can take twelve months for a bowel to recover from a single course of antibiotics. The chemicals in the tap water, put there to kill micro-organisms in the water, also deplete our stock of beneficial bacteria.

Immunisations, in ways not fully understood, also disrupt our gut flora, causing some of our beneficial bacteria to mutate and become hostile. Other drugs (medical and recreational) can also deplete our beneficial bacteria, as does chemical farming (non-organic food) and food additives. Environmental toxins are also involved in the loss and displacement of the good guys from our gut.

This dearth of beneficial bacteria is, in itself, bad enough, in that not enough good guys means that not only are we vulnerable to opportunistic microbes but we may also be unable to process our food and get proper nourishment - we may eat very well but be starved of vital nutrients because we can't absorb them, one possible cause of over-eating.

Not enough of the correct bacteria in our gut leaves us open to invasion by pathogenic microbes, such as cryptosporidium, giardia or candida albicans. Candida is the most common problem and as such deserves detailed discussion, elsewhere, the other microbes are much rarer and can be lumped together as intestinal parasites.

The orthodox medical profession disregards this sort of problem, largely because there is no obvious clinical picture: candida albicans can cause weight loss and diarrhoea in one person and weight gain and constipation in another. The medics will treat the symptoms in this sort of situation and not worry about the causes, especially because the tests for parasites are extremely difficult, expensive and unreliable, and the test for candida is always inconclusive. There are a half dozen or so specialist laboratories around the country offering very accurate testing procedures, but they are all very expensive. In my practice I use a Vega machine to test for these problems; this is effective and accurate and there are other Vega-testers around the country. There are also other similar electronic testing devices. If you suspect you have a problem here then you may need to think about getting tested. Look out for a detailed discussion of Candida Albicans - the yeast infection - in part 4.

© Copyright Wholistic Research Company 2001
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Links to Related Articles...

	Bowel Problems - Hypermotility and Hypomotility
	Constipation 1
	Constipation 2
	Everyone Needs Healthy Bowels
	Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Part 2: The Allergy Factor)
	Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Part 4) - (Could Yeast Be Your Problem?)
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Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Part 1, by Stephen Macallan, August 2001; Copyright Wholistic Research Company