While this blog is primarily devoted to the healing potential of pure, natural Coca Leaf, and while there is ample evidence that Coca Leaf could likely be a very effective therapeutic treatment for Crohns, Ulcerative Colitis, and IBS, that is not the subject of today’s blog.
This blog also focuses on Medical Cannabis, and of course one of the most widely known uses of Medical Cannabis is in the treatment of a range of devastating gut diseases. Although Cannabis therapy does not appear to offer a cure for these diseases, it does palliate the symptoms very effectively and by giving this relief it offers important relief and improved quality of life to those suffering from these diseases. I personally know quite a few people who have found blessed relief through Cannabis, but they all continue to hope for more than just relief from the painful symptoms. They want a cure, and new peer-reviewed medical research suggests that a simple, inexpensive cure may be in sight.
My interest in gut diseases is very personal; the person I love more than anyone in this world has suffered from a multitude of gut problems since some careless doctors burned her gut from esophagus to colon by giving her large doses of antibiotics IV that they had been told she is allergic to.
She has struggled for years with the consequences of this assault and, by strictly limiting the foods that she eats, carefully avoiding any exposure to any of the dozens of foods that now cause violent inflammatory reactions, she has managed to regain most of her vital energy. Still, there has been no cure, and despite persistent research we have yet to find anything that looks promising. That is, until now.
Researchers at Purdue University have just published their findings on the complex actions of particular metabolic byproducts of gut microbes called Short-Chain Fatty Acids (SFCA). Here is my take on what these researchers have found – please follow the link at the bottom of this post and see what you think.
Apparently the Purdue researchers have found that these SCFAs, which are produced by the gut microbes, play a key role in signaling the body’s immune system regarding the state of the gut microbial community – basically either “We’re all good here” or “We have a problem”.
People suffer from Crohns, Ulcerative Colitis, IBS, and other inflammatory gut conditions because their gut microbiome is injured or compromised, and the microbes signal the immune system through SFCAs that there is a problem which the immune system then rushes in to fix. The injured or compromised gut microbiome cannot produce enough of the right kinds of SCFA to signal the immune system that everything is OK, so the immune system keeps trying to “fix” the problem.
Unfortunately it is that “fix” that apparently results in the onset and continuation of these diseases and to date there has been no effective way to turn off the immune system’s attack on what it thinks is a problem in the gut.
My read on this very recently published research is that it looks like many, but not all, cases of inflammatory gut disease can be treated and possibly cured by administering SCFA enemas – basically flooding the gut with the microbial metabolites that a healthy gut microbiome would produce, telling the immune system that everything is all right now and it can stop trying to fix the problem.
I know this isn’t a very scientific way of explaining what I think these researchers are saying, so please do follow this link and decide for yourself. But if I am right, and this is in essence what the researchers are saying, then it may be that at least for some people who suffer from inflammatory gut diseases there may finally be a solution. At the very least this is new information that strongly suggests a new approach that might work, and most encouraging is the findings that SCFA treatment apparently has ZERO negative side effects, and is both simple and inexpensive.
Of course, the researchers are properly cautions, and don’t make any such claim, but as a layman who is praying that a cure can be found, I am pretty excited by this brilliant research, and I intend to follow up as soon as it is possible to find a source of SCFA treatment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4275385/
panaceachronicles 