Richard Whelan ~ Medical Herbalist

Dysbiosis literally translates to bad life. Dysbiosis is the condition where the normal, healthy bacterial flora of the intestine has been replaced with a chronic infection of unhealthy bacteria or fungal organisms or parasites such as worms.

Symptoms of dysbiosis are sometimes obvious and immediate but sometimes it is long-standing and the health problems it produces are not so obviously connected to the gut.

Chronic dysbiosis can come at a great price to our health. Entero-toxins, fungal spores, mycobacterial fragments (some of the common by-products of dysbiosis) are some of the most toxic substances we can have in our bodies. Dysbiosis causes slow poisoning whilst at the same time slowly stealing our nutrients.

Diagnosis can be fraught with difficulties. Mainstream medicine's approach is to analyse stool samples and there are common parasitic infections that show up through this method but equally there are many that don’t. Part of the problem is that everyone has some degree of dysbiosis!

Most adults have between one and two kilograms of microbes living in their guts. An average person has 400-500 different kinds of bacteria and fungi growing in their digestive tracts at any one time.

This means that stool samples or blood antibody tests will almost always test positive for some things but that does not tell us if there is an overgrowth sufficient to be causing ill-health.

I use a hydrogen breath sensor to help assess dysbiosis (bacteria produce hydrogen, we do not) but I think it is of equal importance to listen to my patient's history and their symptoms, look at their tongue and blood, feel their pulse and carefully palpate their abdomen to feel for the classis swelling or bloating of dysbiosis.

Food intolerances cause that same kind of bloating so it can be important to know when the bloating is at its worst. An hour or two after eating certain foods increases the likelihood of it being a food intolerance whereas the classic bloating of dysbiosis can happen just as much on an empty stomach.

I personally have no problem if my patients wish to use pharmaceutical medications (antibiotics, anti-parasitics, or anti-fungals) to kill off their resident parastic infections.

I know many natural therapy people would disagree with me about this. I understand where they are coming from, once you see enough people who have been made sick by the drugs that were meant to help them it's not hard to become cynical about the business of drugs.

In any case the reality is that even if you want to take drugs for dysbiosis they will not always work.

Fortunately there is one substance that I do not believe any bacteria, parasite or fungi has yet learned how to resist, despite thousands of years of continual human use against them, and that substance is Garlic. Read my article on Garlic to see some of the ways I recommend it can be used.

The other herb that I reach for in really tough cases of Dysbiosis is Wormwood. Wormwood is like nothing else on earth in the way it can work through stubborn gut infections. It's also a really hard herb to take so I would strongly recommend you find a good herbalist to help you with this one.

You need to have and keep healthy bacteria inside your body otherwise it is certain that dysbiosis will come back. Whilst you are clearing your gut of dysbiosis and for at least a few weeks afterwards I recommend taking a good probiotic supplement and later on you can expect to keep the process going with the right foods.

You don’t need a large quantity of probiotics but you need to ingest them regularly. Live, healthy bacteria can very quickly make more of themselves in the Garden of Eden that they consider your intestine to be. The marketers of probiotics will try to convince you to buy their product because it contains so many billion more good bugs than the competition. Ignore them, it is not the numbers going in that counts, it is the quality.

1 small tsp of your probiotic powder or 2 probiotic capsules that have been opened and the powder sprinkled on to a spoon
1 cup of milk (cows milk is best for this but you can use Soy if you don’t have any)
2 small trays or containers (no lids are necessary) that have been sterilised by pouring boiling water over them.

Pour the milk in equal portions into the two containers.
Stir the probiotic powder into the milk in one of the containers.
Place both containers in a cupboard and leave overnight
In the morning pour both containers out into the sink and watch what happens.

The container that just had the half cup of milk in it should pour out as expected.
The container that had the probiotic stirred into it should be obviously thicker and hopefully it will have even started to curdle. Those bugs do not take long to repopulate themselves. 8 hours or so should be ample for them to start eating and digesting the milk and, effectively starting to turn it into yoghurt.

In the long term there is a lot to be said for eating fermented foods to help prevent dysbiosis and to encourage good bacteria in the gut. You will find a wealth of practical information on the internet about how to use and enjoy fermented foods.

If you keep your immune system healthy and you eat a clean diet low in sugar and processed foods it is highly likely you will stay clear of dysbiosis or be able to easily get rid of it if it does comes back.