Tracing Origins
This is a wonderful example of causes, progressions and compensations. I recently evaluated a lady who possesses the genetics that would make most people envious. She grew up with perfect health with vital parents. It wasn’t until she was in her forties she developed a problem.
Four years ago, she ate an oily rich dinner in a restaurant. Two days later, she began feeling nauseated and sick to her stomach. This passed within a day or so. A few days later while eating cherries the nausea returned. During the following month, the symptoms of nausea and feeling sick came and went until they began getting worse. Her stomach was bloated, there was a loss of appetite, and when she did eat, she felt sick for hours. Often, she experienced a gagging even with water. She eventually went to a physician who prescribed a strong antibiotic, which instantly remedied the condition. Her symptoms were gone and she had no problems until four years later.
Without any known provocation, the stomach symptoms returned, but this time they were worse. For the next year, she lost thirty-five pounds from not being able to eat regularly. She kept diet logs and could not find any correlations. She made the rounds with medical specialists who performed every know test for evaluating the digestive tract. The entire series of tests proved she was in perfect health. Finally, she decided to return to the original physician in hopes that the antibiotic she took previously might work again. It did, but only for a few days after which the symptoms reached a higher level of discomfort.
When she came to my clinic, she was taking an anti-inflammatory drug three times a day. Without it, the nausea would be so extreme she would not be able to eat. Even having water in her mouth would activate the gag reflex. The examination revealed a fascinating etiology.
Her initial illness was due to Salmonella, but her quality of health and a stomach compensation allowed her to contain it for a month. During this time, it migrated from her small intestine into her bile duct and eventually settled in her gall bladder.
The chronic infection produced large amounts of exotoxins. Exotoxins are a unique substance produced by bacteria as waste products and for defense. They are also necessary for establishing territory to enable colonization. These exotoxins, during the month before treatment, permeated the lining of the bile duct and the gallbladder. The antibiotics she took then killed the active salmonella but the exotoxins remained. This is common with most infections. The presence of the salmonella exotoxins created a chronic irritation over several years that eventually weakened the function of the gall bladder. To compound matters the antibiotic triggered the growth of an intestinal fungus.
Intestinal fungus creates intestinal acidity that adds to the irritation caused by the salmonella exotoxins. After four years, the combination of the fungal exotoxins and the salmonella exotoxins eventually depleted gall bladder function and the nausea returned. The presence of fungus establishes an acidic environment that increases susceptibility to additional bacterial infections. Consequently, the second round of antibiotics helped for a few days by eliminating a recent infection but promoted additional fungal growth making the intestine more acidic. The combination of these factors eventually took its toll on the liver.
The liver is the primary source of bile production. Between meals, the liver moves bile into the gall bladder where it is refined. During a meal, this bile dumps into the small intestine to promote fat digestion. It is then quickly reabsorbed and returned to the liver. In the average meal, bile will cycle three times! If it does not, the liver must then make up the difference. Eventually, an inadequate supply of raw materials causes the liver to signal the stomach during meals to slow down forcing food to remain in the stomach for abnormal periods. This action causes bloating after meals that can persist for hours. This was the final step to producing her condition.
To summarize; an initial Salmonella infection that lasted over a month produced exotoxins that deposited in the lining of the bile duct and gall bladder. This weakened gall bladder function with a resultant decline in fat digestion. The stomach took over (compensated) for the deficient gall bladder by increasing its lipolytic activity. This caused temporary relief of symptoms, but compensations are meant to be temporary. As the stomach function declined the symptoms returned. Antibiotics produced a fungal infection that contributed to intestinal and bile duct acidity. The combination of these two infections decreased intestinal resistance to additional infections. A second round of antibiotics increased the intensity of the disorder. Deficient bile circulation depleted liver function creating the additional stomach distress of bloating. Finally, prolonged stress depleted adrenal cortical DHEA causing stress intolerance.
This is a brilliant progression of the body’s incredible intelligence in managing illness and a good example of how the body can only take so much. Ideally, the patient should have seen a physician within a few days of symptom onset, but this was a foreign behavior until now.