I have a question for you. How many times would you treat the same infection before you asked why it keeps coming back? Today’s patient, that’s exactly what happened. She was treated for h Pylori four times, four times twice by functional medicine practitioners and twice by her medical doctor. And it would go away for a while and then it would come back.
And that’s when I stopped and asked myself the question, why? Why is this infection keep coming back? Why can we not get over this 20 plus year h pylori infection? What I figured out. We’ll change everything. I can’t wait to show you what it is. Let’s go. Welcome to the Clinical Entrepreneur Podcast. I’m Rhonda, your no fluff.
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Well, welcome back to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve had so much great feedback about these episodes. I know you’re all loving them, so you are welcome. I’m just sharing with you my fails and my wins and a little bit of the in between. So I first have to say I am on location. I am not in my normal abode in Seattle.
I’m actually in Hawaii, and my voice is a little raspy. I’ve been like laying around, not doing much, not talking much, and just sort of relaxing and or doing some work. Probably more than I care to admit. But don’t ask me that. I’m not gonna tell you. But anyway, it’s beautiful outside. I’m overlooking the harbor and there’s probably 200 boats in the harbor up on the 18th floor.
And just have a beautiful view of the sunset. And so if you live in colder weather, now’s a really good time to go to Hawaii. If you live in warmer weather, you’re not gonna care that I’m talking about this. But for me in Seattle, this is a great place to be for right now. So headed home in a few days, but I wanted to knock these out before I get back.
’cause otherwise we get behind and my staff doesn’t like it when I’m too far behind. So here we go. I got a really good case for you today. As I mentioned, this particular patient is, I’ll give you the, the specs on her first. She’s 55, normal weight. She’s a retired dental hygienist and she’s lived all over the world.
Her and her husband and family have traveled like everywhere, hither and yawn. So her first. Event. Like I’ve always, I’m always asking what is the never been well since moment. And for her it was after she had traveled to Africa and then she’d also got food poisoning in Greece and Spain when she was there.
So, you know, in my brain I’m like, oh well, and this is what we do. Like we all do this. Well, if you don’t, good on you. ’cause I do the first thing I do. I make a judgment call. Oh, that’s got to be, you know, she’s got a digestive bug. That’s the problem. And, and so I just jumped to conclusion. Sometimes, you know how you jump to a conclusion and then you think, oh yeah, well that’s it.
And you just keep marching right down that road. Even though there’s all these other street signs that are saying, turn left or turn right, or Don’t go here. Go there. You kind of get tunnel vision almost, and that’s what sort of happens. So her primary complaints are obviously the digestive issues. So she’s had.
This. Oh, and I’ll, I will tell you, she did not drop that she had h pylori until well into our probably second conversation I wanna say. So I didn’t even know, and the reason I didn’t know was because she did not, it didn’t occur to her that it was an issue because she’s had it for so long. So because she’d had it for so long, it just, she was like me, you know, whatever.
It’s no big deal. So I don’t know this ahead of time. I just know she’s massive digestive issues. And when I say digestive issues, it’s not constipation, it’s not bloating. She belches and belches and belches and I mean like, I call it man burping or it’s just obnoxious. Sorry guys. But like that deep belch.
And she said, smells like sulfur, onions, hot dogs, sulfur, garlic, all that. She said, I literally can clear out a room. And I’m thinking, oh, well of course that’s hypochlorhydria or an altered, you know, signaling for hydrochloric acid to get released from the parietal cells. Like I’m thinking about all that.
So again, I’ve kind of got my tunnel vision going on. She has some belching, I mean some gas, a little bit of reflux once in a while. She does have some food sensitivity, so I, you know, I’m kind of like paying attention to that. She said she’s got some back and joint pain, maybe a little bit of tendonitis, maybe some tightness in her fingers, a little bit of weight gain in the mid, you know, central area.
But she is in menopause, so I kind of chalked that up to that and she said I can’t do intense workouts and I’m not able to lose these last five pounds. So thought, okay, well all that, you know, kind of sounds like partially hormonal. We definitely have a digestive issue. I can see where the point of origin.
Could be when she was sick in Africa and then Greece and then Spain. So I’m kind of forming my opinion. I’m thinking, okay, well all roads sort of point to digestion here, and I don’t think I’m wrong about that. Oh, she’s also concerned about her memory. But I think that that was more of a peri, or, excuse me, a menopausal thing.
So she describes her symptoms like this. She calls them flareups, and she said the flareups happen from food sensitivities. So she said, I absolutely cannot tolerate whe no, no way, no how. It makes me have so much gut pain. I can’t even live with myself. I said, okay. Gluten gives her gas and more stomach pain the way actually made her vomit and have diarrhea several times.
She can’t do any cruciferous vegetables because they make her be gassy and bloy and give her diarrhea. She can’t do fiber. Fiber makes her. Be horribly bloated. Now, that was a key for me and really achy. She said, my whole body aches if I eat fiber. And I’m thinking, boy, we got some inflammation happening.
Possibly. She says, maybe onions and garlic, because I, she said, I think that the onions and garlic, when I eat them, they make my burp more ods. Okay. Fair. She said fried foods and sugar both make, she said they will amplify anything she said. It makes it a bazillion times worse, I think. Okay, gallbladder, maybe there’s some yeast going on.
Her gut is a mess, and she said, I just literally can’t tolerate any dairy. She can’t even do cheese. She said, I feel the best. I always ask people like, what? Kind of diet makes you feel the best, even if it’s not what you love to eat. What makes you feel the best? She said, I feel best when I am on protein and high carb foods.
So she does really well with things like oatmeal, things like, you know, baked potatoes and that kind of thing. So she does okay with butter, but she doesn’t do okay with the dairy. So she does crave, has a really strong craving for sugar and salt. I thought. Okay. Well. That’s adrenals and, and we’ve got some blood sugar, maybe some yeast stuff going on.
All right. And she said most of the supplements that she’s been given over the years cause her stomach pain and nausea. So there’s kind of a lot to unpack here, but still, I’m still down the, on the road. In my mind I’m thinking, okay, this is Di digestive issue. The problem is at this very moment in time, as I’m beginning to kind of get this case together.
I do not know yet that she has h pylori or that had been treated four times. I do not know this yet, so, okay, so I’m marched down the road and what do I do? I do what every self-respecting practitioner would do, and I start with up or digestion, right? This is what we do. So I give her something for, to like improve HCL.
I gave her some hypothalamus support. I gave her some bitters and I gave her some gallbladder support. And I’m thinking we have to just start here. ’cause I know if the fatty foods bother her, she’s got a little bit of reflux. I give her all those things and I say, let’s just, let’s roll with this for a month and I want you to watch for changes.
Keep a log of what you’re eating or not eating. Have her do all the normal things. And then I said, just get back to me. Let’s chat back in like three, four weeks. So three, four weeks comes back and she said, there’s no change. How can there be no change? I’ve never had that happen before. I know when I use these supplements, they always work.
What is happening? This is the conversation where she brings up, well, oh yeah, well I’ve had h pylori for 20 some years. I about fell out of my chair. So what? Whoa. Yeah, I’ve had it. I thought I put it in the paperwork. I looked back, it was not in there. So I said, uh, well that changes it. Tell me what they did.
So she couldn’t really remember the functional medicine practitioners. What they did, they just gave her, threw a bunch of supplements in her, probably much like what I just had done. And she said it just never got any better. So she said, I decided to go to the medical doctor the first time and they use what’s called the triple therapy and that is, uh.
I think it’s, um, Pepto Bismol and antibiotic and I don’t remember whatev, whatever else it is. I can’t remember. So they have a triple and a quadruple therapy. So they put, do these things. She had the triple therapy Once she had the quadruple therapy once and it went away. Well then I know that it’s bacterial.
Because if you do an antibiotic and it goes away, we know we’re clearly dealing with a bacterial issue or something that the antibiotic targets and, but then it comes back. That was the clue for me. That was the clue. The clue is that it’s this bacteria. This h pylori is living in a biofilm. That, and I’m sure it’s abundant in her stomach.
So for a little bit more context before I get into how I fix this, she said when she was in her twenties, ’cause I asked her about stress. ’cause you know, stress will dysregulate the digestive system, right? So I asked her about her stress, she said, when I was in my twenties, um, and her daughter was young, she was a, what she described as a hot mess.
And the functional medicine practitioner, which just listen, this makes me so crazy. You guys know how I feel about this. The functional medicine practitioner said, your adrenals are shot. You have a whole bunch of allergies. Of course, they said she had heavy metals and parasites because why would you not say that?
Everybody said, oh, it’s a parasite. It’s a heavy metal. Oh, it’s yeast. It makes me so crazy. It’s like putting someone in a box and assuming that they have something just because that’s your paradigm. You’re, you’re, you are in the same lane I was when I was like, I’m just gonna give digestive support.
Everybody’s got a lane. And some people are like, everything’s a parasite. Everything’s a heavy metal. I don’t do that. So she does tell me this and she said they tested my stool and it came back positive and they did my blood and it came back positive. I’m like, well, it really would’ve been nice if I knew this.
We would’ve saved you some money and time if I had known this before. She said recently, just kind of out of the blue, she said, recently I had a funny episode after I had a Starbucks drink and I said. Tell me about that. And she said it was severe brain fog, severe. Like I could hardly drive myself home. I could hardly remember where my car was, how to get in the car, how to start the car, how to get home.
I thought, okay, well we really have got some gut. Brain issues going on. There’s some traffic in the gut brain axis along that highway that needs to not be there. Or we have like a blockade somewhere because we’ve gotta get that fixed. But now I’m back to this h Pylori thing. So she’s kind of got stuff going on all over the place.
She has had all of her COVID shots and all of the boosters. She’s on HRT, she’s taking NSAIDs regularly. Melatonin to sleep, Benadryl to sleep, and a bunch of other crappy affluence like some. Weird cheap Omega-3 from Costco, and she’s taking 5,000 IUs of vitamin D and, I don’t know, magnesium and some mag, I don’t know, just a bunch of junky stuff.
She’s tried NAET, so she did spent $20,000 on NAET for her and two of her kids, and everything that the NAET practitioner did, didn’t work. Now. I’m not saying NAET doesn’t work. This is just, remember, this is her subjective opinion, right? This is her subjective experience. So unless the infection is dealt with, you know, the under infection, I don’t know if the practitioner only did NAET and I don’t know what kind of supplements were given, so.
I am not saying NAE doesn’t work. I think it works really well. I just don’t know. That’s just her subjective opinion. She said she tried acupuncture, chiropractic massage. She’s tried all the things, and the most recent functional medicine practitioner as expected, had her on a heavy metal detox. So. I started, as I mentioned, with the upper digestion.
I was like, okay, we’re gonna do bitters. We did a little of Xan. I gave her some gallbladder support. We talked about maybe doing the 21 day purification, which I still really love. I toyed with giving her a little bit of boswellia because she was kind of complaining about her joints. I. But I didn’t because I put myself in check.
It’s so easy to see a long laundry list of supplements in someone who’s not feeling well and think, oh, I’ll give you Boswellia for this and I’ll give you digestive support for this. And then something for your gallbladder, and then something for your memory, and then something for that. And what ends up happening is you have a protocol that’s got 20 bottles of stuff all legit, and then the patient goes, I can’t take it.
I don’t wanna take any more supplements. Don’t blame you sweetheart. Don’t blame you one bit. So I didn’t want to go down that road. So, as I said, four weeks later, she comes in no change, zero burping, belching, I’ll call it. Still exactly the same. She still has acid reflux. Her joints, she said maybe a little bit better, but I didn’t even give her anything.
So I’m not sure what that was all about. But the one win was that she was able to get off the HRT. She did it on her own. And I said, well that’s great, and she’s doing fine without it, and there’s not just very minimal hot flashes and night sweats and that kind of thing. So I was pretty happy about that.
But I know she’s gonna need some liver support, but I don’t think the liver is crucial right now with this. H Pylori thing. So I knew then that because she’d been treated four times because the two functional medicine practitioners didn’t give her anything for biofilms. Neither did the medical doctors.
So I thought, okay, that’s my end. I’m gonna give this a try. Excuse me. So I’m so hoarse today. So I thought, alright, well I gotta explain to her what a biofilm is and why I am doing this. This the way that I’m doing it, because this is the thing that most people miss and they did. So first, before I go off on a biofilm, let me just explain to you super quickly what it is.
So these pathogens, not a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them are very good at living in biofilms. In fact, the biofilm becomes their protective matrix that they live in in order to evade being killed by an antibiotic. That’s it in a nutshell. So it’s a protein casing that gets formed by the pathogen.
It’s like I’m putting a fire blanket around myself. I’m out of the woods and there’s a big fire that’s rolling through and I have one of those fire blankets. I roll myself up in a fire blanket and I’m gonna just lay there and let the go over the top of me. And I’m fine when I’m done. I got warm, but I did not get burned.
That’s what a biofilm is, to a bad guy, to a pathogen. Now, good beneficial bacteria also live in biofilm, so not all biofilms are bad, but when the bacteria gets in the biofilm and then you use an antibiotic or an antimicrobial even like something like oregano oil or something. Like berberine or something like that we’re gonna use to try and address a pathogen.
It’s not gonna get what’s in the biofilm. So what we need to do is we need to disrupt the biofilm. So we need to break that biofilm down and make it less stable so that the little creatures that live inside can come out and get whacked by the whatever. We’re gonna give the antimicrobial that we’re gonna give.
Does that make sense? So that’s what I did. I started with the biofilm and I explained to her this is why the previous treatments have not worked, I believe. So before we can quote, kill and get rid of the h pylori, we have to start to gently address the biofilm. So here’s how I change the protocol and this, uh, spoiler alert, game changer.
You ready? So here we go. I’m gonna tell you exactly what I did. First I thought, alright, this bad boy’s been there for 20 plus years. And it’s been resistant to everything. So in my mind I’m thinking this biofilm has got to be thick, robust, and occupy a lot of space. No telling where else biofilm lives.
She probably has some yeast, she probably has some gut disp. I, I think all of that’s going on like further down in the intestinal tract, but I know I can’t address what’s down there if I can’t get her food to break down. We still have all these food sensitivities that tells me something’s up in the upper digestion.
So I thought, I gotta start, I’m gonna start kind of where I was, but instead of going down the H, the like hydrochloric acid bile, instead of going down that pathway, ’cause clearly that didn’t work. What I’m now gonna do is start with a gentle, what I called the Prep and Prime. And I did this for 14 days, so just two weeks.
I did a prep and Prime. Here’s what I did. I gave her a biofilm disruptor. Now you can find them all over the place. Clear Labs has one standard process, has one. Doctor’s research has one by a biotics, I believe has one. They’re you find one. The one that you like. Don’t care. They’ll work. Even acid dolus will work as biofilm.
Disruptor. So I used the one from Standard Process ’cause she already liked Standard Process and she said, I, I tolerate those supplements really well. So I said, okay great. So I use that product, it’s called Biofilm Pro Balance. So I gave her that. Now this is two weeks, right? I’m not doing anything to kill, this is kind of against the rule that I’ve stated before, like in Clinical Academy.
I talk about how you have to do the biofilm disruptor and a killing agent, but I didn’t wanna do that this time. So I decided to do a biofilm disruptor, and then I gave her some okra pepin, which is also from standard process. The reason I did that is because I’m suspecting that there’s probably a lot of mucus and others secretions that are just making that stomach kind of gnarly and the mucus.
If there’s extra, if there’s enough mucus in there, they that might prohibit the bacteria from adhering to the stomach wall. So this was my thinking. I thought, okay, I’m gonna enhance the mucus barrier, then I gave some masic gum. Now mast gum has very underscore underscore very gentle antimicrobial properties.
And it is specific for h Pylori. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna do that because I’m just gonna, I’m not gonna go in with a big old machine gun to try and kill. That’s not gonna work. So I used the Bhe disruptor, something to help with mucus, a little bit of mast gum, and then I gave her some Sardi. The Sardi also is a beneficial yeast, but what it does is it helps to crowd out other pathogens.
And it supports digestive resilience during any kind of treatment. So it’s a good one to add anytime you have a gut issue. So that’s all I did was those four things. I said, we’re just gonna do these for two weeks food wise. I said, I want you to eat warm cooked foods. Nothing cold, nothing raw, like everything has to be really easy to digest.
No oai bowls for you. No, no, we’re not doing that. Cold, sugary fruit in there with a whole bunch of fruit on dot, no warm cooked meals. And I said, I want you to decrease the NSAIDs. Alcohol and stay away from the foods that you know irritate you, which were like what you would think raw food, spicy foods, that tomatoes, they were bothering her and of course, things she’s sensitive to.
So she said, okay, no problem. And I said also, I gave her a form. I said, I want you to track your symptoms. And I don’t often ask people to do that because people get what I call navel gazing and they start like mulling over and, and what I don’t wanna say ruminating. On, oh my gosh, I have this symptom now and now I have this symptom, and oh my gosh, what does that mean?
And then I have this, and then they can’t get out of that cycle. Does that make sense? They can’t get out of the, I gotta think about it forever and ever cycle. And I didn’t want that to happen either. So I said, just generally kind of keep track of your, what you eat and then how you’re feeling. And so after two weeks, she did great.
She said, no change in my burping, but I might be noticing a little bit less reflux. A little bit less just gastric, just not feeling well. I thought, okay, I’m on the right track. So now I moved into what I called for her, the Target and eliminate. And I like to give them names like this because they like the patient’s like it.
And I wrote this all up for her and I gave it to her as A PDF. I said, you know, first we’re gonna prep and Prime. So in her mind, she’s like, okay, we’re just getting ready. It was like we’re putting fertilizer on the soil. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re gonna target and eliminate. Here’s when I went for the big I big guns.
We are gonna continue the biofilm disruptor, we’re gonna continue the okra, and we continue the mast gum. But I added in, this was big. I told her we’re gonna go big or go home. You have a big, huge infection here. And if we don’t get, if we don’t pull out all the stops, we’re not gonna make any progress. So the first thing I gave her was.
Olive leaf extract. I used the olive leaf from Gaia. It’s got a lot, a gentle antimicrobial, but it’s an immune support. So I wanted to harness the immune function for this h Pylori infection. The second thing that I gave her was Biocidin from cell Core, and I started, I said, just start really slow with the Biocidin.
The other thing that I gave her, like that’s my killer, right? That’s the one of the killers and the other one that I’ve always had such great luck with. Is HPLR from Designs for Health, and I thought I’m gonna add in the HPLR, it’s specifically formulated for h pylori, obviously. But when she started that H-P-L-R-I doses it two, twice a day.
She literally came undone and she said, I knew which one it was. I knew which one it was. So I said, okay, stop that. So, you know, sometimes you go down a path with a protocol and you’re thinking, oh yeah, this is gonna work great. And then it doesn’t work Great. And you have. Stop and you know, reorganize yourself and think, okay, what was the problem?
Sometimes I’ll just have them stop everything and then we’ll add ’em back in one at a time because that’s how I can at least see which one is causing the problem. But this case she already knew. She’s like, I know that’s the one. That’s the one. So we took the h pylori out one. The HPLR. We just kept in the Biocidin, we kept in the olive leaf, we kept in the um.
The three from phase one, the biofilm disruptor, the okra, Pepin, and the masum. So now she’s on five things, right? Five supplements. And I said, if you feel a little bit more tired, you’re a little headachey or a little bloaty, that’s okay. We’re kind of remodeling this digestive system. We’re getting rid of some of these microbes, but the only microbes that we’re getting are the ones that are outside the biofilm.
We’re not going after the ones inside the biofilm. This is going to take time. So if it gets too intense and you get too many symptoms and just reduce the dose and you can be in control. But just let me know when you do that so that I can kind of monitor on my my side. So the other thing I told her, and I tell all everybody this, you always wanna watch for changes in frequency, intensity, and duration.
Write that down unless you’re driving a car. Write that down. We want changes. We wanna see changes in frequency, duration, and intensity. If you start seeing changes like that, good, positive changes, not going the wrong way, but good changes, then you know you’re over the target. Keep going because sometimes the intensity will decrease, but the frequency in the duration won’t change.
I’m fine with that. Sometimes the duration will change and the intensity and frequency won’t change. So as long as one or more of those are changing, I’m super, super happy. So here’s what ended up happening her. We are now in, I wanna say we are, well, we actually just made a change. So since I. I prepared this episode.
There’s been some more updates I’m gonna give ’em to you. One of them’s a cliffhanger at the end. I don’t know what the problem is, but I gotta figure it out. Maybe you know, if you know, you can email me and tell me. So what happened was I kept her on that protocol for about three months and we ended up being able to get the h pylori supplement, the H-P-L-R-N, up to one in the morning and one at night.
And she does fine if she goes to three per day. Crash and burn. Stomach hurts really bad. What’s happened though is the belching is gone. Belching that deep, like kind of belching gone. Now, if she has to burp, she can actually close her mouth and just burp with air. Now she said it’s still pretty odor, but at least it’s not that deep belch where there’s so much air in there that she just.
Big old fat burp. So do you see what I’m talking about with the frequency, duration, and intensity? So the intensity has changed, the frequency has also changed. She said I was burping kind of all day long. Now, most of the time I’m gonna burp maybe a little bit after lunch, maybe a little bit, and maybe a little bit after dinner.
But they’re fairly small and they’re. They’re silent. She said, I am so happy with that. And the other beneficial thing is that she’s now able to tolerate a lot of those foods so she can, she’s back to eating spicy food. She’s doing fine with cruciferous. She’s doing fine with sulfur and sulfur foods like onions and garlic, which I’m thrilled with.
She was tra gonna be traveling overseas and she said, I’m so nervous about going because traveling and not having, being able to make your own food and when you have food sensitivities is a nightmare. I don’t wanna be sick, I don’t wanna have diarrhea, I don’t wanna be down with stomach pain. None of that.
So she was so happy. She went on her trip and she was able to eat and she said, I haven’t felt this good in years. I’m like, yes. So now I’m gonna tell you, just for the sake of telling you what phase three is, which we have not started yet. Once I get this h pylori issue resolved, and it’s gonna take me a hot minute, I’m gonna move her into more of the gut remodeling.
I’m gonna bring back the Espo. I’m gonna do more gut repair support. I might keep in the Biocidin, I don’t know, but that’s kind of what I’m thinking. We’re gonna work on mucus membranes and we’re gonna get the barrier back intact. You cannot tighten up a leaky barrier until you deal with infection. So people who run around practitioners who say, oh, I’m fixing leaky gut.
Oh, good for you. Did you figure out why it’s leaking? You can’t fix it if you don’t know why. So otherwise, it’s gonna keep leaking and you’re just chasing your tail. So she’s doing phenomenal. So I said, all right. So I just talked to her probably two weeks ago maybe. So here’s the update. Ready. This is a good part.
This is what I need your help with. So what I did was I switched her up on a few things. I, she said, I am so tired of taking supplements. I am kind of over it. Like it makes me wanna cry. I said, oh, I hear you sister. Okay, let’s do this. Which of the supplements are the most important to you that you don’t wanna stop?
She said, I do not wanna stop any of the h Pylori supplements. I said, I would agree with that. Let’s, let’s keep those. I said, what else? She said, well, really, like, I, I have her on, um, calm Restore from Gaia, which is for anxiety. And she said, I really like how I feel on that one. I said, great, let’s stay on that one.
And I’m thinking in my mind. Those would’ve been the two things, because I need to keep stress down in order to keep digestion, you know, get that out, get her out of sympathetic state. So those would’ve been my two choices. And I said, for all the rest of them, just push ’em aside. We’ll get back to ’em. Don’t worry about spending money on supplements that you’re not gonna finish.
We’ll, we’ll finish ’em all. Don’t worry. But I said, for right now, just focus. Let’s just focus on the ones that you know, make the biggest difference. But she said, the thing that’s still bothering me is these, this smelly burp. She said, I was at the grocery store the other day with a friend. My friend was probably six or seven feet ahead of me down the aisle, and she said, I just had a little quiet burp.
And I burped. She said, I didn’t make any noise. It was just air. It just kind of came out through my nose. And she said within maybe 15 seconds, my friend turned around and looked at me and said, did you just burp? Yeah. Yes I did. She said, dang girl, I smell it all the way over here. That’s gotta be a really good friend to tell you that.
But she still, so they’re still really ods, so I thought. Okay, what can I do? Maybe I need to do something that’s gonna bind up or absorb some of the gastric secretions in the gut, in the stomach, something I’m thinking. That was my thinking. And I said, okay, well how would you be? Okay, I wanna do two things.
One, I’d like to add some gym nema. And she was fine with that ’cause I explained how that works for sugar craving the magical, you know, 10 day sugar craving cure. I said, so I wanna add some gym NEMA and let’s see if we can get you off the sugar. ’cause she said she can stay off of it. But once she gets it, she said, I’m literally like, I’m outta control.
I can’t stop. So I said, okay, we gotta get that handled. So I’m gonna do gym nema. And I said, I wanna give you something that is going to help to absorb some of the contents of the stomach. She said, okay. So I give her the product and. Here’s what happened. About three weeks goes by, we get on the phone, this was just a couple weeks ago, and she goes, you know, I don’t know that the burps are any better, but the sugar cravings are a lot better.
Thank you very much. I said, you’re welcome. She goes, I can literally look at something sweet. Normally, I would’ve been like fighting myself to not do it or trying to distract myself, and I’m not even tempted. I said, that’s how Jimmy Nema works. But she said, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m having horrible, ruminating negative, dark thoughts.
Like someone’s gonna die and the world is gonna end. And what happens if I walk across a crosswalk and I get hit by a car? And what will happen to my body and how will they find me and what hospital will they take me to and what will my kids do? And what about my husband and I better go home and I better like make sure everything’s all organized and ready for him because if I die, like death, kind of dark thoughts.
And I said, well, that’s weird. Have you ever had that before? And she said, well, I’ve already always kind of. Tended that way. I kind of tend to be a worrier. No big surprise there. She said, I kind of tend to be a worrier, but this just is to a whole new level. Like it’s bad. And she said, I worry about like when my husband walks out the door in the morning for work, I, I think all day.
What if he gets killed? What if he, what if he dies today? How am I gonna, how am I gonna do this? And what’s the password to his this and how am I gonna know and where’s our money? And what she said, I literally, I focus on it all day until he gets home. And then some other dark thought will come up, or I think about my kids or whatever.
I said, so you’ve always been like that, but this is whole new level. She said, yeah, I can’t quit thinking about it. I said, wow, that’s fascinating. I said, well, when did this start? She goes, I don’t know. Three, four weeks ago I said, Hmm, was it before Christmas or after Christmas? Because you know, if you can kind of pinpoint a point in time sometimes it helps people remember.
Otherwise they just lose context for time. And she said it was after Christmas, and I’m looking at her protocol. I knew it wasn’t the Jim Nema. I knew what it was. It was that. Product that I gave her to absorb, and it was, and I hesitate, I’m gonna tell you what the supplement was, but I kind of hesitate because I’m not saying it’s a bad supplement.
I’ve used it with other people and have not had this problem ever. This is new, brand new for me. I mean, I just don’t even know. But the product was GI Adsorb from Standard Process, and I like the product. I’ve used it, I’ve taken it, no problem. But in her, when we gave it to her. It caused that dark, ruminating thoughts.
So I said, okay, why don’t you stop taking that? Give it 48 hours and let’s see how you do. And I’m mean, 48 hours later, maybe three days later, she sends me a message and she said, you are genius. She goes, that was it. It was that supplement. I stopped it Ruminating. Bad thoughts, negative thoughts, dark thoughts, death thoughts.
Gone. Gone. Just like that. Wow. I don’t know if I’m a genius or not, but I just figured it out based on the timeline, but I don’t know why that happened. So this is my puzzle with this one. Like we’re still in process with this case, but I know this, no one has made any made progress. Like we’ve made progress in the last probably four to six months.
And I don’t expect this is gonna go away, it’s gonna take me a year. I don’t expect it to go away fast. But remember, if I can get changes in frequency, duration, and intensity, I’m super happy. I’m happy with that. So my takeaways to you are like, as usual, if you’re, if the treatment has failed before. Don’t do the same thing.
I know that sounds logical, but we just get in the like tunnel, right? Upper digestion, gallbladder support, bitter hydrochloric. A, we just get in the tunnel. Vision. Heavy metals. Oh, yeast. Oh, whatever. Stop. Just stop and ask why? Why? What was different? Clearly, the antibiotic therapy, the triple in the quadruple therapy, they worked for a short time.
Why the functional medicine practitioners did the same thing kind of twice. It didn’t work. Why? That is critical thinking. That’s clinically critical thinking. The second thing is don’t ever forget about these biofilms. They are very, very real. And when you have any kind of underlying infection, you have to address the biofilm and then don’t just rush in.
Be careful that you don’t rush into the killing phase, because the killing phase, she, I don’t think she would’ve been ready. I needed to kinda warm that up to go in with the big guns. So my big guns was the HPLR supplement, you know. But I warmed it up gently with olive leaf. My big gun was Biocidin, but I warmed it up gently with like the lar.
So don’t be afraid to spend a few weeks. I know like we’re all anxious to like solve the problem, but don’t be afraid to spend a few weeks and nurture the terrain, nurture and nourish the patient, and then. I think another lesson I learned with this one is I knew it, but I, it just was a good reminder when your first approach doesn’t work, stop, go back and reassess, because that was what I had to do.
But to my credit, I also didn’t know she had age pylori. So I don’t know though I might’ve, I might’ve still done the same thing. Yeah, hindsight’s 2020. I can’t be objective about that. So chasing symptoms is not the same as addressing the root cause. I know you know this, but sometimes. It is so tempting because we know all the things about these supplements.
We’re like, oh, we’ll take this for this and this for this and this for this, and we end up managing symptoms and chasing the symptoms and eh, yeah, okay, fine. Patient feels better, but does that mean you’re making them better? Does that mean you’re really making them better? Probably not. Probably what you’re doing is you’re just masking the symptom by giving them a supplement.
So there were four rounds of treatment, four failures, and nobody stopped to ask why. And I firmly believe that the answer was a biofilm because I am, and I’m not saying me like pat myself on the back, but no one had ever addressed the biofilm, and that is the only difference. I’m still giving her the antimicrobials.
I’m still supporting. All the normal, logical places that everybody would’ve, but no one gave her a bowel thumb. And I think that was the thing we needed to break down that protective fortress that the bacteria built around itself. Like the fire, fire blanket. We needed to break that down so that I could get inside and kill whatever is in there.
Those bad guys that are in the in there. So as you know, in this clinical thinking series, I’m just giving you my cases, like some of them are wins. This one’s a win. That’s still in progress. Definitely a win. I’ve got a few more failures coming up, don’t you worry. I want you to know I have a resource for you.
And I distilled down the way that I think about these cases into six principles, and they’re the six kind of clinical thinking principles that I, I have them written down on a sticky note. They always are on my computer. And as I’m working with a patient, I’m asking these questions. I’m like, okay, what?
Are the things that I cannot forget as I’m working through this case. These six principles I have for you is free, so you can go to rhonda nelson.com/six principles. It’s the number six principles and you can just download it. And if you want more information, you wanna keep learning. I would love to have you In Clinical Academy, there are hundreds of lessons that talk about all the things you ever need.
To know about how to implement functional medicine in your practice? The training programs are amazing. Like FMU and IFM, all those training programs are amazing ’cause they teach you the what? They teach you the what. Clinical Academy gives you the how, so I’d love to have you in there. If you want more like this, you can go to rhonda nelson.com/clinical Academy, but grab the download.
It’s really good. Six principles, so rhonda nelson.com/six, the number six principles, and next week I have probably the hardest case of this series. It’s probably the hardest one. And you’re just gonna have to wait and listen. It’s, it’s a really good one. Alright friends, thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.