Dr Amir Khan

So peppermint tea, but you can get peppermint tablets as well on prescription called colpamin.

which we can prescribe for people as well.

And once we've ruled out all serious causes, if loose motions is a problem or constipation is a problem, we'll give them a laxative for the constipation or something like loperamide for the diarrhoea.

Managing symptoms, yeah.

They are your best friends because we haven't even talked about what they do to your immune system.

So it's a bit like a friendly game of, I don't know, what's a friendly game of cat and mouse?

So they train your immune system to know what's a good thing and actually, you know, your immune system can practice on them and what's bad.

And so when you've got a healthy group of bacteria and viruses and fungi living in your gut, your immune system can practice on them.

So it knows when to react and when not to react.

Go, OK, this is friendly.

This is not friendly.

If you've got a...

imbalance of friendly and unfriendly in there what that can do is trigger your immune system off and what it might be linked to this imbalance of gut microbes in your gut is autoimmune conditions because your immune system doesn't quite understand what

what is friendly and what's unfriendly and what we know about autoimmune conditions is your immune system has overreacted to something usually a bacteria or an infection of some sort and rather than switching off once that bacteria and infection has cleared it keeps carrying on and starts attacking healthy tissue so autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis lupus psoriasis

there could be a link to gut microbiome here.

So if you've had an imbalance there, then that could trigger off these kind of things.

All the time.

And allergies as well.

Food allergies could be linked to gut microbiome in the very early stages.

So there's loads that the gut microbiome is responsible for.