At this point these particles are identified as foreign bodies or invaders by your immune system.

At this point you may develope food allergies, or environmental sensitivies because your body is now identifying things that come down the back of your throat from post nasal drip, etc as foreign bodies and it attacks them.

In the end this can wreak so much havoc on your immune sytem that other viruses, bacteria and even fungus can move forward successfully and make you chronically ill.

Other things that cause "leaky Gut" are infection, candida overgrowth, (happens after multiple antibiotics) and the overuse of NSAID's (ibuprofin, naprosyn, etc).

It is imperative to reverse this early on as the myriad of problems that could arrive my be more than just an inconvenience...ending up as life-long disabling conditions and/or life threatening in a few scenarios.

I hope this helped.

How do you treat it?

L-Glutamine is a necessary supplement as this is building block of all cell production through out the body...especially the gut ligning.

Candida over-growth can also cause this to NOT heal...so an anti-candida diet and regimen that may include anti-fungals and herbs IS highly recommend..if not a tryue necessity.

Trout

[This message has been edited by richtersl (edited 14 August 2005).]

Since the medical establishment does not recognize this (some of you know our story) treatment for my 15 year-old daughter's leaky gut was seriously delayed. The MD's insisted it was an eating disorder.

Now that we have MD's who do recognize leaky gut, it is very late in the game. My daughter's bloating and fluid retention got so bad that blood vessels broke in her skin all over.

We have now found that the immune system's damage may have attacked her adrenal gland, as she is not producing much cortisol. Her thyroid is also affected. She already has diabetes.

She is so weak and fatigued she can barely move.

This is an extreme case. I never knew it could get this bad. Get yourself a test for candida and for intestinal permeability. Great Smokies Lab does them. An endoscopy also helped diagnose my daughter. She had extensive GI yeast.

This is not Lyme, which we believe was treated adequately. Some of her doctors would shrug and say "it's all just the mysteries of Lyme disease" which also delayed treament.

In my opinion, that is one of the things that is wrong with the health care system in the U.S.today. There is no magic pill to cure "leaky gut" so the doctors and drug companies have renamed it irritable bowel syndrome or my favorite comment to hubby was "a functional G.I. disorder". This was several years ago -- before Lyme diagnosis.

Great Smokies and several other labs do test for this. In hubby's case the test results have always been consistent with how he is feeling and general G.I. function.
http://www.gsdl.com

If you are taking antibiotics and the probiotics are not enough to stop diarrhea then you should consider adding Bifido bacteria or Saccharomyces boulardii -- a good yeast specifically used to cure antibiotic induced diarrhea.

email me if you need sources/brand recommendations for these supplements.

If those things don't help, and you continue to have problems then I would take the test from Great Smokies or one of the other labs.

The doctors who know most about this type of problem are not gastroenterologists but general MD's who belong to ACAM (American College for Advancement in Medicine)

Go to http://www.acam.org Click on Public and then Find a Doctor

The more reading I have done over the last few years the more I am convinced that many neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's are directly affected if not caused by poor G.I. function.

You have probably heard the phrase, "You are what you eat". The reality is closer to "You are what you absorb." That includes toxins such as chemicals and pesticides and preservatives in food and parasites such as giardia in water.

Please don't ignore your G.I. symptoms as they will only get worse with continued antibiotic use.

The "cure" must be individualized depending on the cause -- if caught early on there may be no additional viruses, bacteria, fungus/candida, parasites to deal with. But the longer G.I. function is impaired the harder it is to figure out what is the problem and how to treat it.

Bea Seibert

But it has always been the practice of renaming diseases. My grandmother's sister died of 'lockjaw'. Today it is called Tetanus. There wasnt any CDC or FDA then.
It was just renamed and perectly acceptable to do so. Just as STARI has been renamed.

In the case of 'leaky gut', I dont think it was renamed IBS.

IBS is easily accepted without a problem.

However, you should make sure that your insurance is not filed under a psychiatric code (some of my medical books say IBS is treated with antidepressents & counseling!!).

Moving your bowels apparently is an emotional event.