Dr. Trisha Pasricha

They're going from the gut to the brain.

So if most of the communication on the vagus nerve is happening from the gut to the brain, it completely flipped the script.

It makes me wonder, and this is what researchers then started to ask, what if we had it backwards?

What if it is gut dysfunction that's responsible for our anxiety?

What if it's gut dysfunction that causes depression?

What if it's gut dysfunction that causes neurodegenerative disorders?

And that completely changed our field and it's still shaping medicine today.

It's more than a belief.

I mean, thank God.

At this point, we have decades now of data that's showing that this is true.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, if your whole life you've been told that your gut symptoms are due to stress, they're due to your anxiety, they're due to your depression, then you're left only with this set of tools and medications and treatments that are going to address the brain in your head.

That's all you have.

So you're going to be taking things like antidepressants, anti-anxiety medicines, maybe you'll do cognitive behavioral therapy.

All of these tools are important and they have a really important place in treatment of these disorders.

However,

Once you realize that the gut can be the source of the problem, it opens this door to this whole other toolkit of treatments that will primarily target the gut to interrupt that vicious cycle.

Absolutely.

I mean, we don't think of the gut-brain connection as just the brain talking to the gut or just the gut talking to the brain.

We have seen so many times it's a vicious cycle, right?