Dr. Trisha Pasricha

It's called the enteric nervous system, right?

The brain in your head is called the central nervous system.

Well, we have this enteric nervous system

that actually a lot of organs had well before they had a brain in their heads, right?

Like the jellyfish.

Picture a jellyfish.

It's like this cute little floating translucent dude.

You can see right through his head and there's no brain, right?

But somehow it's out there.

It's making decisions about where to get food.

It's deciding what it's going to eat.

It's all because it has this network of nerve cells throughout its tentacles called the enteric nervous system that's helping it make that decision.

There were some really landmark studies that were done in the 90s and then 2000s that basically flipped this paradigm about how stress impacts the gut on its head.

So, you know, IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, is one of probably the most common diagnoses in all of GI, not just my world, but it is one that neurogastroenterologists see a lot.

And the most common thing I hear from my patients who come to me is that for most of their lives, they were told, it's all in my head.

My gut symptoms were due to stress.

And it sounds like you got told that too at some point.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I think that's not necessarily intended to be as dismissive as it is, but it's because of this several hundred years of like, that's how we framed it in medicine.