One of the things that I think was crucial to dealing with SIBO, or any chronic illness, is getting enough rest to give the body time to heal.   I had been thinking of writing this post last week and then I listened to this podcast with Meghan Telpner on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast and decided that she said it all better than I could.   I’d recommend anyone dealing with a chronic illness listen to what Meghan has to say.

In my case I was used to living a pretty fast paced lifestyle.  If I wasn’t at work coding or managing a team at what was the world’s biggest and craziest software company I was out running, hiking, climbing, fishing, biking, etc… basically anything that would keep me in motion.  So getting SIBO was a huge shift for me and hard to accept that I had to slow down and get some real rest.   Dr. Bowen told me again and again, my new “job” was to relax and heal, not be be doing all the time.

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Dr. Pimentel has been at the lead of SIBO research over the last few years and has uncovered the underlying causes of the illness, notably the autoimmune reaction causing the destruction of the vinculin protein that helps drive the migrating motor complex of the small intestine.   For the last few years he has been focusing on methane patients quite a bit and trying to find a new solution to the illness since those with vinculin antibodies relapse frequently.  It looks like he is in Phase 2 Clinical Trials now on a new drug that stops methane production in m.smithii.  You can read all about it at the Synthetic Biologics site – the drug is currently known as SYN-010.  This “cure” seems to really just be stopping the archea from producing methane which causes the symptoms instead of killing off the m.smithii directly.  Not sure how I feel about this, it seems to be treating the symptoms instead of the root of the problem and those archea and bacteria will still be in the wrong place eating your food in the small intestine.   The drug is a variation on lovastatin and statin drugs also have side effects that are pretty undesirable to me at least, especially myopathy.

Dr. Ruscio is running a similar study using Red Rice Yeast instead of a drug since that is a natural statin.  Hopefully he gets good results w/o the side effect rate of SYN-010.   Stay tuned.

In my recent post I went over my actual treatment protocols that I used for SIBO and briefly mentioned the other things that probably helped my treatment.   I decided to do another post on just these aspects of dealing with SIBO since I think they are almost as important as the actual anti-microbial treatment.   In the classes I have done for Health Coach training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, IIN, these aspects are called Primary Foods in contrast to the actual foods that one puts in ones mouth.   The Primary Foods are – Relationships, Spirituality, Exercise and Career.  How do these apply to my SIBO healing?  Read on.

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Lately I’ve been asked by several people about what treatment I did to get rid of SIBO so I decided it was a good  time to summarize so I have it in one place.  Now keep in mind, what worked for me may not work for you since it seems that everyone is different when it comes to SIBO.  I also had methane (CH4) dominant SIBO and didn’t show any hydrogen (H2) until my CH4 numbers were way down but having CH4 means you have H2 underneath since the m.smithii methanogens eat the hydrogen gas created by the other bacteria to create CH4.

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