Dr. Trisha Pasricha

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?

Like if you have horrible gut symptoms, as many people are living with every day,

that can give you anxiety.

And then the anxiety can fuel the gut symptoms and vice versa.

And it's not sometimes just intervening at the level of the brain and the head that can stop them.