For the past few years, I've had gut issues with a very unclear root cause. I was definitely under an insane amount of chronic stress due to the pandemic and isolation when the issues started, but after isolation ended and my life should have been less stressful the issues persisted. Some doctors seemed to take this gut-brain connection thing to mean that it was all in my head since they couldn't find anything medically wrong with me. That was incredibly frustrating because I was experiencing real physical issues like weight loss, hair loss, bloating, indigestion, etc. But all of the tests and biopsies they did came back normal. With functional medicine and a lot of trial and error with diet and lifestyle changes I've gotten to a point where I feel pretty much recovered, though still with a very sensitive gut. I never discovered the root cause of my problems. My leading theories are long-covid, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or chronic stress. Possibly a combo of those things.
All of that being context, the thing I wonder about this is, if chronic stress does indeed inflame the gut, what does the process of reversing that inflammation look like? It doesn't seem like you can simply remove environmental stressors to undo the inflammation. It seems that there are feedback loops and damage that occur that can take awhile to undo. When someone has a stressful life, it can be difficult just to reduce the amount of stress, much less completely redesign their life to be less stressful. And gut inflammation makes it even harder. Even if they manage to do so, say perhaps by taking a year long sabbatical if they can afford to do so, removing the stress may not be an instant solution.
I hope more research is done in the area of healing from gut inflammation triggered by chronic stress.
To pull an HN evergreen and reply to the overly specific instead of your main point: My wife developed "histamine intolerance" after a time of heavy stress, in a story that's scary similar to yours. It took her years to figure it out, from chance result on a super broad blood test. To confirm this, she changed her diet to be only low-histamine foods and it made all the difference. She went from "a single chocolate chip cookie makes me sick for 3 days" to "mostly leading a normal life, just watch what you eat" in half a year or so. Over time it helped her gut recover to the point that she now generally does not need to watch out much anymore, except in some periods when some old symptoms pop back up and she reverts to low-histamine diet for a while.
Statistically speaking this is probably not it and you considered/tried it already, but just wanted to bring it up in the off chance that you hadn't heard of this before. I mean doctors just said "irritable bowel syndrome! theres no cure sorry bye". She's been writing a low-histamine foodblog for some years, which includes a good starting point for what to eat and avoid: https://histaminefriendlykitchen.com/histamine-friendly-food...
Meditation, mindfulness, reframing, emotional self-care, movement, exercise. The usual things.
Not trying to be smug.
But I noticed on a three week vacation, where I was walking 15K steps a day, I lost weight and had zero gut issues while eating freely in restaurants for the duration. Got home, day one the old issues came back. I definitely had a stressful association with my day job and the attendant life. I let a lot of things slip because I allowed that my situation required me to reward myself with lethargy and vices. When I’m above the baseline on self care, I don’t turn to the vices as much and my physical systems generally work better.
I got back into my “me first” routine and my gut issues subsided. For me it was like a switch.
I went through it for many years. It got to the point where certain foods made me feel unwell. I had brain fog. Felt tired, exhausted. I changed my diet, cut out a lot of processsed foods and got by as best as I could.
In the end I realised stress was a major factor. Diet would have an impact but stress was the triggering agent that would make certain foods much more inflammatory.
I broadened my diet, ate much healthier. Made more effort to do exercise on a regular basis.
Slept regularly, slept earlier. Took time to go hiking or running long distances. Stopped thinking about work after hours. Made an effort to stop worrying about things outside of my control.
It took a few years and I reversed almost all the symptoms.
The main problem is with stress + gut issues, it's a downward spiraling feedback loop. Stress causes gut irritation, gut irritation makes you more stressed.
I suggest going to a gastroenterolog, that knows about gut flora restoration. Basically you'll get a Low-FODMAP diet for a month, then RENEW diet for ~1 year, but you will also get a bunch of special probiotics, mostly based on Bacillus Subtilis.
During this time the negative feedback loop is being broken, the gut will have a chance to recover and the symptoms should improve/disappear.
I am slowly finishing this diet and I have to say that apart from a few ups and downs, it helped me tremendously. I have much more energy during the day, less oily skin and hair, smoother skin on my face, and consistent stool.
I recommend an Organic Acid Test (OAT). I've been struggling with gut problems similar to yours for years but then it got so much worse during the lockdowns. At the time I survived it by embracing fasting and keto diets but that wasn't much fun.
More recently my OAT discovered fungal activity and an enormous vitamin C deficit. Potentially this has been going on for more a decade and it would explain why I'm so tired all the time. Treatment through supplementation is in the early stages but I'm already feeling noticeably better.
If you want to go a bit off the traditional path, you can look into BPC-157 which is a peptide that was designed to help heal the gut. Nowadays it's mostly used by athletes and anti-aging people to help heal soft tissue damage, but the original purpose was to heal your gut.
If you're in the US, you can probably find an anti-aging clinic with a doctor that you could ask about it.
The change in my gut health has been astounding. There was a period about 1.5 months after I started taking it when things definitely felt worse (which I guess is about the time the bacterial colonization was underway) but since then I've felt so much better it's incredible. About 1.5 years now with it as my standard and improvement is consistent.
Now for me this was a big improvement, but it works better (for me anyway) when paired with Questran Lite[2] which is prescription (at least in Australia) but has become the darling of GI doctors because it seems to have good results in improving gut health. I was on it before I started the L. Reuteri, but things only improved once I added the probiotic in.
So - in order: try L. Reuteri supplements for about 6 months (because it's OTC). If the gut inflammation is an issue there's evidence that they will in fact help reverse it. If things are still somewhat not great, get a Questran Lite prescription (though there's actually a global shortage going on now).
The L. Reuteri theoretically you don't need to keep taking, and I did try going off them for about 6 months recently, and was mostly fine but eventually started seeing some regression so started taking them again.
You might want to read 'The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir' by Sarah Ramey (Known also from her band Wolf Larsen). She goes back and forth between providing an overview of this 'mysterious illness' from different angles, and her gutwrenching absolute trainwreck of a personal experience of it. It seems you already found your way the same way she eventually did, though.
As the title says, the book is womens body specific - but also a guy i still found it very insightful to read.
Like sibling posts say, inflamed gut leaks histamine, inflames it more and leaks more. Try low histamine and in general low processed and spicy food diet for a while to reset this feedback cycle. Good start: https://www.mastzellaktivierung.info/downloads/foodlist/21_F...
I've been in biotech long enough to see that the beaten path (traditional drugs) does not have robust answers due to patentability.
Post-stress inflammation can persist due to latent infections of various kinds. To accelerated recovery, I would recommend a course of plant-based anti-pathogen treatments. (Not going to shill a specific one.)
My non-verbal son has autism and gastrointestinal issues. Unfortunately, all the pediatricians would test for is C-diff. After years of problems expressed in the most challenging behavioral ways(!), we finally had an MD (trained as a naturopath) prescribe a battery of pathogen tests (https://www.gdx.net/gut-health) that identified an obscure protozoa. Nearly, overnight difference upon treatment (a drug). The remaining GI issues were addressed with plant-based treatment. I've also suffered from GI issues that improved substantially with anti-fungal focused supplements (e.g., French Tarragon leaf).
I would recommend eating a diverse range of fermented food too (yogurt, real sauerkraut, etc), since they compete with pathogens for resources.
Inflammation is an immunological reaction. It can be triggered a few different ways. Chronic inflammation is either because of a chronic infection or some sort of immune disorder. Chronic immune disorders don't just stop. They have a trigger and then keep going for the rest of the suffers life at some level. They can be controlled, but they can't be cured. This is because of the way the adaptive immune system works, which produces antibodies. Antibodies do a lot of different things, but one of the things they do is trigger inflammation in the presence of a specific protein. Your body has the capability of producing antibodies for basically any conceivable protein. Once an antibody is triggered, by having cell damage while the antibody is "activated." Your body replicates the B-cell that makes that specific antibody and the antibodies stick around in your blood stream. This is why you become "immune" after getting a vaccine, your body is able to "remember" the antibodies it needs to use in case you catch the real disease. When there is cell damage and the presence of another protein, your body could "remember" the wrong antibody. If it's environmental, this is an allergy. If it's from your own body, making the antibody attack some component of its own body, it's an autoimmune disorder. Once triggered, there's no known way to reverse that negative association. Immune disorders are also incredibly difficult to diagnose.
I have a friend who is a Nurse Practitioner. In Canada this is pretty close to a doctor in that they can order tests, diagnose patients and prescribe treatments and medications. She was in private practice for a while.
She talks often about how the most common complaint she saw by far is gut distress with no medical cause. It is so common that the medical professionals call it SLS: Shit Life Syndrome [1]. She argues that the vast majority of the people who come in with this complaint have an undiagnosed mental problem. Our systems aren't built to handle this kind of situation. We find and treat acute problems and we don't really address holistic life-style issues. In fact, it is frowned upon. What she usually wants to say is: your life sucks, fix it and you will feel better. Go out for a walk, eat healthier food, make some supportive friends, engage in some self-care, meditate, etc.
I personally believe that a lack of purpose in people's lives is manifesting as pain in our bodies. But that is dangerously close to woo-woo New Age thinking and most people will just reject it off-hand. Instead they will try magnesium pills, apple cider vinegar, avoiding gluten, anti-inflammatory diets, micro-dosing lsd or mushrooms.
As a side note, she also mentioned that the newest fad (not quite at gut distress levels yet) is middle-aged men insisting they have ADHD, demanding diagnosis and prescriptions.
> As a side note, she also mentioned that the newest fad (not quite at gut distress levels yet) is middle-aged men insisting they have ADHD…
The reason for this "fad" is straightforward — there are a lot of middle-aged humans who are undiagnosed because ADHD was effectively "not a thing" when GenX were kids.
> …demanding diagnosis and prescriptions.
Great! People of all ages should advocate for themselves and pursue health care that might improve their quality of life.
> What she usually wants to say is: your life sucks, fix it and you will feel better. Go out for a walk, eat healthier food, make some supportive friends, engage in some self-care, meditate, etc.
It’s almost like we haven’t collectively created a society that aims to increase human flourishing and instead of created a living nightmare with the illusion of progress due to shiny new technologies.
Whoa. I have been struggling with this issue for a long time. My gut has turned very sensitive and bloated. I could have a hard day even if I have strong coffee. Let alone skip a meal. My medical diagnosis doesn't show any problem with my stomach or gut. I used to smoke and there used to be times when it was stressful at work and I believed it was natural for anyone these days. After 2 years of stoppinh smoking + taking care of my diet + medicines it is still not gone completely. It's uncomfortable to live with this.
If we look at this research and also look at the recent analysis that 1/10 people have some kind of autoimmune disease like Crohn’s then it seems safe to conclude that stress is literally slowly killing us.
Seems like the root issue might just be society wide stress and anxiety at levels and at a scale never seen before. We can jaw all day about how GDP has never been higher and how much TV there is to watch now, but we’ve never been chronically sicker and we’re trending the wrong direction.
I’ve often wondered if huge amounts of stress as a child could cause celiac disease, or be one of the factors. As the child’s body is developing, having parents go through a divorce or experiencing a death in the family, could create life long physiological effects.
Van der Kolk's and other similar research seems to show a pretty strong correlation between childhood trauma/ptsd and adult inflammation disorders. IIRC the gut link gets a small chapter in the famous book he wrote about that research.
After a really really bad (prolonged) work situation, I started getting wicked acid reflux—with a very clear trigger between stress and subsequent symptoms. I remember at one point opening a passive-aggressive email from my boss and instantly feeling like a battery had exploded in my mouth.
The reflux never went away, even after my work situation improved, and some other gastrointestinal symptoms worsened until I recently got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Which I am genetically predisposed towards, but I still like to say that my shitty boss gave me Crohn's (and not entirely in jest).
Although drugs have helped both issues immensely, I will say there's a pretty substantial link between my symptoms and bouts of stress. A lot of people with IBD (and to some extent, IBS) are all too aware of the paradox that if you spend too much time worrying about the possibility of a flare-up, you're all but guaranteed to have a flare-up. The tummy is a fickle beast!
One big open question for me is what my body counts as stress. I have had short, objectively stressful situations, which had no impact. My longer-term stresses feel like they are more of the style “it’s a job, that is why they pay you“ but switching jobs might have helped? It’s not like I can do that enough to get statistical significance. And I don’t think an outside observer would consider my new job definitely less stressful than my old one, but there might be some dimension, which is really important to some subconscious part of me. And I don’t think an outside observer would consider my new job definitely less stressful than my old one, but there might be some dimension which is really important to some subconscious part of me.
That’s part of the reason that I resisted the stress explanation for so long: even if you accept it in general, it’s very unclear what to do about it, so I wanted to keep exploring more tangible causes
Evolutionary, stress helps an animal to survive an imminent danger. Stress (glucocordicoids) divert your energy to either flee or fight. Digestion? It's not important if survival is at stake. You can survive with a bloated stomach but not a missing stomach.
If stress is chronic then you get the bad stuff all the time.
I would just like to point out that in the space of two decades we've whipsawed between "ulcers aren't caused by stress, they're caused by bacteria" to "no actually ulcers might really be mainly caused by stress."
Many such cases. I once wondered whether my decision to not pursue a PhD in physics was a mistake, but I increasingly believe we live in a Dark Ages. It is impossible to take the vapid Science as an institution seriously, especially when it embraces this myth of science being constantly correct.
(And yes, I understand there's a difference between scientific press and actual scientists. And no, you're wrong if you think their self-esteem or general sheltered Mickey Mouse worldview around their importance is any different than the public press.)
Could the ulcer question just vary based on the type of ulcer? I know that h. pylori is a big culprit in people who have ulcers but are otherwise healthy, but IBD causes ulcers too (putting the "ulcerative" in "ulcerative colitis")—and since stress is a driver of IBD flares, those are certainly ulcers by way of stress. But they occur in different portions of the gut, usually.
> "ulcers aren't caused by stress, they're caused by bacteria" to "no actually ulcers might really be mainly caused by stress."
Por que no los dos? H. pylori needs to artificially buffer its micro-environment in order to survive. Anything which disrupts the production of stomach acid or digestive proteins could give it an edge.
Anecdata of 1, but I had a bout of bad chronic heartburn after eating at some sketchy food joint. I was popping omeprazole like crazy. Somehow in researching this, the topic of hydrogen forming bacteria came up. I somehow hypothesized that PPIs were actually exacerbating the problem, because the higher pH was allowing the bacteria to survive. I put myself on a high prebiotic/probiotic diet, stopped the PPIs and antacids, and it resolved completely by a few weeks later. I could easily see a similar thing happening with heliobacter.
Ulcers are not all the same just like cancer is not all the same. H pylori still causes gastric ulcers.
Also the “medical-science” institution you are imagining with a collective self-esteem doesn’t exist in any cohesive way. You memorize, read, diagnose and treat.
We have decades of partial answers as to how the brain affects the gut, but none are anywhere near complete.
This finding, that some gluco-corticoid derivatives inhibit cell maturation, is new in its specifics but there was plenty of evidence to suggest the hypothesis. But it's a tiny part of an entire ecosystem. People are already told to avoid NSAID's, so it will have little clinical impact.
Saying "autoimmune disease" is as precise as saying you have a performance problem in the cloud. Worse, people mistakenly use that term for any chronic immune-system-mediated syndrome.
Even worse, saying that "People are sick because society is stressed, so we should reduce stress in society" completely misdirects useful resources. People who want to do good need to dig in and do the work, not hand-wave.
Chronic immune-mediated diseases fall in the crack between primary care and GI specialists. The specialists only have time for surgery or drugs, and primary care doesn't have the expertise for the patient months-long self-experiments required to isolate relevant factors (among diet, stress, infectious disease, microbiome, genetics).
This is a structural health-care opportunity for anyone able to take it. Private equity could fund practice groups with a few doctors and 6:1 advanced-practice providers, partnered with diagnostics and EHR peers, carefully working through and evolving GI algorithms and diagnostics. The alternatives (surgery and drugs) are expensive and ineffective and the incidence is high, so the market is definitely worth pursuing. Longer-term, it may help with automating the actual practice of medicine, where each patient is an experiment with a series of knowns, some negotiated interventions, and a track record of results: all invaluable data for this case and those like it, and a methodology applicable to other chronic immune diseases. Automating the accumulation of expertise scientifically in a practice system is really the future of computers in medicine. It will never happen via diagnostics (Quest, LabCorps) or EHR (Cerner/Epic) because their virtues are contra-indicated in the continuous experiment of treating chronic disease.
I had some gut issues and switching jobs to WFH friendly made it all gone away. It's much easier to change your bad habits when you have more control of your environment. It wasn't in COVID times though, it was around 2015.
Unlike the article and other posters in this thread, I have an entirely biological viewpoint on the matter. I think there is ample reason for GI disturbances to exist from chronic chemical insult from tens of thousands of compounds present in our food for which our bodies did not evolve to tolerate. I think the experience of stress over the matter is a natural consequence of disturbances in normal organ functionality. The same stress happens when other organs have issues. What is the purpose of psychological stress if not to motivate the organism for change and a need for adaptation? With what I have learned in the past 10 years of medicine and biology I am almost thoroughly convinced that every single thing is physical and some day will have far better solutions that make people drastically more capable resilient and stable and so many practices and denominations that exist today will be archiac antiquity.
I first got IBD when I was 18 and preparing for the final high school exams that decided which university I can get to. Then I got it under control, but it returned several times, always when I was under a lot of stress.
It's nothing more than an anecdote, but I can't help but correlate the fact that I was diagnosed with colon cancer in late 2016. I joined as one of the first 12 employees of a startup a few years earlier and I can absolutely say with respect to stress and nutrition it was one of the roughest periods of my life.
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek, but in my experience chronic stress is more caused by financial hardship, bad relationships, overwork and other daily life stuff.
(I wrote my comment before you massively edited yours)
[+] [-] yosito|2 years ago|reply
All of that being context, the thing I wonder about this is, if chronic stress does indeed inflame the gut, what does the process of reversing that inflammation look like? It doesn't seem like you can simply remove environmental stressors to undo the inflammation. It seems that there are feedback loops and damage that occur that can take awhile to undo. When someone has a stressful life, it can be difficult just to reduce the amount of stress, much less completely redesign their life to be less stressful. And gut inflammation makes it even harder. Even if they manage to do so, say perhaps by taking a year long sabbatical if they can afford to do so, removing the stress may not be an instant solution.
I hope more research is done in the area of healing from gut inflammation triggered by chronic stress.
[+] [-] skrebbel|2 years ago|reply
Statistically speaking this is probably not it and you considered/tried it already, but just wanted to bring it up in the off chance that you hadn't heard of this before. I mean doctors just said "irritable bowel syndrome! theres no cure sorry bye". She's been writing a low-histamine foodblog for some years, which includes a good starting point for what to eat and avoid: https://histaminefriendlykitchen.com/histamine-friendly-food...
[+] [-] browningstreet|2 years ago|reply
Not trying to be smug.
But I noticed on a three week vacation, where I was walking 15K steps a day, I lost weight and had zero gut issues while eating freely in restaurants for the duration. Got home, day one the old issues came back. I definitely had a stressful association with my day job and the attendant life. I let a lot of things slip because I allowed that my situation required me to reward myself with lethargy and vices. When I’m above the baseline on self care, I don’t turn to the vices as much and my physical systems generally work better.
I got back into my “me first” routine and my gut issues subsided. For me it was like a switch.
[+] [-] thevagrant|2 years ago|reply
In the end I realised stress was a major factor. Diet would have an impact but stress was the triggering agent that would make certain foods much more inflammatory.
I broadened my diet, ate much healthier. Made more effort to do exercise on a regular basis.
Slept regularly, slept earlier. Took time to go hiking or running long distances. Stopped thinking about work after hours. Made an effort to stop worrying about things outside of my control.
It took a few years and I reversed almost all the symptoms.
[+] [-] dombesz|2 years ago|reply
During this time the negative feedback loop is being broken, the gut will have a chance to recover and the symptoms should improve/disappear.
I am slowly finishing this diet and I have to say that apart from a few ups and downs, it helped me tremendously. I have much more energy during the day, less oily skin and hair, smoother skin on my face, and consistent stool.
[+] [-] johnnymorgan|2 years ago|reply
Did anyone check your gut flora and provide an analysis, did anyone every take a sample before to compare to?
Diet changes is probably heavy protein, some greens, no carbs type style?
I'd recommend diving into probiotics, you'll get very little help from most doctors as they don't know shit about it (pun intended!)
Years and years of IBS like symptoms, like 20+ years of it. Probiotics, fermented foods, protein and greens...I shit like a god now.
Stress affects stuff, that's normal but it's never a single source issue when it comes to overall health.
If you ain't pooping right, solve that first.
[+] [-] cjdell|2 years ago|reply
More recently my OAT discovered fungal activity and an enormous vitamin C deficit. Potentially this has been going on for more a decade and it would explain why I'm so tired all the time. Treatment through supplementation is in the early stages but I'm already feeling noticeably better.
[+] [-] doix|2 years ago|reply
If you're in the US, you can probably find an anti-aging clinic with a doctor that you could ask about it.
[+] [-] XorNot|2 years ago|reply
The change in my gut health has been astounding. There was a period about 1.5 months after I started taking it when things definitely felt worse (which I guess is about the time the bacterial colonization was underway) but since then I've felt so much better it's incredible. About 1.5 years now with it as my standard and improvement is consistent.
Now for me this was a big improvement, but it works better (for me anyway) when paired with Questran Lite[2] which is prescription (at least in Australia) but has become the darling of GI doctors because it seems to have good results in improving gut health. I was on it before I started the L. Reuteri, but things only improved once I added the probiotic in.
So - in order: try L. Reuteri supplements for about 6 months (because it's OTC). If the gut inflammation is an issue there's evidence that they will in fact help reverse it. If things are still somewhat not great, get a Questran Lite prescription (though there's actually a global shortage going on now).
The L. Reuteri theoretically you don't need to keep taking, and I did try going off them for about 6 months recently, and was mostly fine but eventually started seeing some regression so started taking them again.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917019/
[2] https://www.news-medical.net/drugs/Questran-Lite.aspx
[+] [-] wolfpack_mick|2 years ago|reply
As the title says, the book is womens body specific - but also a guy i still found it very insightful to read.
[+] [-] Lapsa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bujak300|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biomcgary|2 years ago|reply
Post-stress inflammation can persist due to latent infections of various kinds. To accelerated recovery, I would recommend a course of plant-based anti-pathogen treatments. (Not going to shill a specific one.)
My non-verbal son has autism and gastrointestinal issues. Unfortunately, all the pediatricians would test for is C-diff. After years of problems expressed in the most challenging behavioral ways(!), we finally had an MD (trained as a naturopath) prescribe a battery of pathogen tests (https://www.gdx.net/gut-health) that identified an obscure protozoa. Nearly, overnight difference upon treatment (a drug). The remaining GI issues were addressed with plant-based treatment. I've also suffered from GI issues that improved substantially with anti-fungal focused supplements (e.g., French Tarragon leaf).
I would recommend eating a diverse range of fermented food too (yogurt, real sauerkraut, etc), since they compete with pathogens for resources.
[+] [-] enkid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mial|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoogeny|2 years ago|reply
She talks often about how the most common complaint she saw by far is gut distress with no medical cause. It is so common that the medical professionals call it SLS: Shit Life Syndrome [1]. She argues that the vast majority of the people who come in with this complaint have an undiagnosed mental problem. Our systems aren't built to handle this kind of situation. We find and treat acute problems and we don't really address holistic life-style issues. In fact, it is frowned upon. What she usually wants to say is: your life sucks, fix it and you will feel better. Go out for a walk, eat healthier food, make some supportive friends, engage in some self-care, meditate, etc.
I personally believe that a lack of purpose in people's lives is manifesting as pain in our bodies. But that is dangerously close to woo-woo New Age thinking and most people will just reject it off-hand. Instead they will try magnesium pills, apple cider vinegar, avoiding gluten, anti-inflammatory diets, micro-dosing lsd or mushrooms.
As a side note, she also mentioned that the newest fad (not quite at gut distress levels yet) is middle-aged men insisting they have ADHD, demanding diagnosis and prescriptions.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_life_syndrome
[+] [-] CharlesW|2 years ago|reply
The reason for this "fad" is straightforward — there are a lot of middle-aged humans who are undiagnosed because ADHD was effectively "not a thing" when GenX were kids.
> …demanding diagnosis and prescriptions.
Great! People of all ages should advocate for themselves and pursue health care that might improve their quality of life.
[+] [-] voisin|2 years ago|reply
It’s almost like we haven’t collectively created a society that aims to increase human flourishing and instead of created a living nightmare with the illusion of progress due to shiny new technologies.
[+] [-] venk12|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|2 years ago|reply
Seems like the root issue might just be society wide stress and anxiety at levels and at a scale never seen before. We can jaw all day about how GDP has never been higher and how much TV there is to watch now, but we’ve never been chronically sicker and we’re trending the wrong direction.
[+] [-] gareth_untether|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giraffe_lady|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ImHereToVote|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spondylosaurus|2 years ago|reply
The reflux never went away, even after my work situation improved, and some other gastrointestinal symptoms worsened until I recently got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Which I am genetically predisposed towards, but I still like to say that my shitty boss gave me Crohn's (and not entirely in jest).
Although drugs have helped both issues immensely, I will say there's a pretty substantial link between my symptoms and bouts of stress. A lot of people with IBD (and to some extent, IBS) are all too aware of the paradox that if you spend too much time worrying about the possibility of a flare-up, you're all but guaranteed to have a flare-up. The tummy is a fickle beast!
[+] [-] orzig|2 years ago|reply
That’s part of the reason that I resisted the stress explanation for so long: even if you accept it in general, it’s very unclear what to do about it, so I wanted to keep exploring more tangible causes
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] meliorika|2 years ago|reply
If stress is chronic then you get the bad stuff all the time.
[+] [-] abernard1|2 years ago|reply
Many such cases. I once wondered whether my decision to not pursue a PhD in physics was a mistake, but I increasingly believe we live in a Dark Ages. It is impossible to take the vapid Science as an institution seriously, especially when it embraces this myth of science being constantly correct.
(And yes, I understand there's a difference between scientific press and actual scientists. And no, you're wrong if you think their self-esteem or general sheltered Mickey Mouse worldview around their importance is any different than the public press.)
[+] [-] spondylosaurus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortex|2 years ago|reply
Por que no los dos? H. pylori needs to artificially buffer its micro-environment in order to survive. Anything which disrupts the production of stomach acid or digestive proteins could give it an edge.
Anecdata of 1, but I had a bout of bad chronic heartburn after eating at some sketchy food joint. I was popping omeprazole like crazy. Somehow in researching this, the topic of hydrogen forming bacteria came up. I somehow hypothesized that PPIs were actually exacerbating the problem, because the higher pH was allowing the bacteria to survive. I put myself on a high prebiotic/probiotic diet, stopped the PPIs and antacids, and it resolved completely by a few weeks later. I could easily see a similar thing happening with heliobacter.
[+] [-] throwaway4220|2 years ago|reply
Also the “medical-science” institution you are imagining with a collective self-esteem doesn’t exist in any cohesive way. You memorize, read, diagnose and treat.
And please don’t lump us in with phDs
[+] [-] w10-1|2 years ago|reply
This finding, that some gluco-corticoid derivatives inhibit cell maturation, is new in its specifics but there was plenty of evidence to suggest the hypothesis. But it's a tiny part of an entire ecosystem. People are already told to avoid NSAID's, so it will have little clinical impact.
Saying "autoimmune disease" is as precise as saying you have a performance problem in the cloud. Worse, people mistakenly use that term for any chronic immune-system-mediated syndrome.
Even worse, saying that "People are sick because society is stressed, so we should reduce stress in society" completely misdirects useful resources. People who want to do good need to dig in and do the work, not hand-wave.
Chronic immune-mediated diseases fall in the crack between primary care and GI specialists. The specialists only have time for surgery or drugs, and primary care doesn't have the expertise for the patient months-long self-experiments required to isolate relevant factors (among diet, stress, infectious disease, microbiome, genetics).
This is a structural health-care opportunity for anyone able to take it. Private equity could fund practice groups with a few doctors and 6:1 advanced-practice providers, partnered with diagnostics and EHR peers, carefully working through and evolving GI algorithms and diagnostics. The alternatives (surgery and drugs) are expensive and ineffective and the incidence is high, so the market is definitely worth pursuing. Longer-term, it may help with automating the actual practice of medicine, where each patient is an experiment with a series of knowns, some negotiated interventions, and a track record of results: all invaluable data for this case and those like it, and a methodology applicable to other chronic immune diseases. Automating the accumulation of expertise scientifically in a practice system is really the future of computers in medicine. It will never happen via diagnostics (Quest, LabCorps) or EHR (Cerner/Epic) because their virtues are contra-indicated in the continuous experiment of treating chronic disease.
[+] [-] orzig|2 years ago|reply
I did not think of my commute as especially bad, nor any other part of being in the office, but the timing is pretty coincidental
[+] [-] st4lz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kortex|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Madmallard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|2 years ago|reply
BTW asthma also gets much worse with stress
[+] [-] frereubu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wonnk13|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|2 years ago|reply
and how in todays world do you feel we can avoid stress?
[+] [-] beardyw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manmal|2 years ago|reply
(I wrote my comment before you massively edited yours)
[+] [-] readthenotes1|2 years ago|reply