Don’t you know? It’s normal to drastically injure your gut.
As you know, I had a massive health crash several years ago. It was a slow descent, and as things got worse, at some point I decided to stop taking any painkillers whatsoever.
At that point, everything was a mystery, and I had no idea why everything was happening. However, even the little I did know suggested to me a reality about powerful synthetic chemical compounds (drugs) – namely, that ordinarily, if a compound is found in a living thing, it is found adjacent to other compounds that balance or augment it. Take for example, the flavonoid compound quercetin: I found out the hard way, and subsequent research confirmed, that if you just take quercetin on its own, it will quickly oxidize in your stomach, not good. In order to prevent this from happening, you should always take quercetin with vitamin C. Now: do a quick Google search (Brave search, actually) of the foods that contain quercetin. Would you look at that; they all contain vitamin C! Strange! But not so much, if you think about it: if vitamin C or a similar compound is required to prevent the breakdown of quercetin, you would expect that vitamin C etc would show up in a food with quercetin – otherwise, that living thing would cease to be living, aka “dead.”
Anyways. At a certain point it dawned on me that NSAIDs (i.e. acetaminophen, ibuprofen, aspirin, etc; technically an acronym for “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug”, however, you’ll often see “night time sleep aid” – can you say marketing?) are essentially a synthetic concentrate of powerful plant compounds. Except, they’re synthetic. And concentrated. In other words, very close to the original compound, but not quite; and likewise, without the surrounding complimentary compounds.
Now, you might not think this is a big deal. I certainly didn’t, for most of my life. However, just because something is chemically close to another thing doesn’t mean it’s the same – take one molecule away from sodium chloride and you get sodium, which instead of making your steak taste great, will burn your face off. Yikes.
But as I said, originally, it was sheer gut sense: after seeing how things presented in nature, and thinking about it, I realized that it probably wasn’t a very good idea to be taking concentrated synthetic compounds.
It was only until later when I began to delve into gut research, that I began to see a pattern: in every single gut injury study, without exception, there were three classes of patients that were excluded. All patients in these categories were excluded because it was recognized that essentially by definition they would have ongoing gut injury. The first of these categories were people who took SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). The second were people who took antibiotics. And the third – you guessed it – where people who had recently taken NSAIDs.
As usual, you’ll be told there’s no alternative. By “no alternative,” as always, it’s meant that – surprise surprise – whatever else you try won’t work like a drug, and therefore won’t “work” because only drugs work. Shocker. But I reject the whole circular premise: I don’t want to override my systems. I happen to be quiet invested in them, and confident in their Designer. I’ll endure the pain. Or, if it gets to be too much, I’ll try things that won’t force the body, but might clear things so that the body can do what it needs to do: take a bath, hot pad, massage, sauna, DMSO, wild lettuce tincture, turmeric, willow bark tincture, etc. (note that the latter two are the living forms that contain the molecules that ibuprofen and aspirin are attempting to extract and approximately synthesize – so near yet so far).
Even aside from much larger questions (for example, whether it’s a usually good thing to use a drug to override your bodies systems), I realize that something was off in the land of NSAIDs. Gut injury should never be thought of as normal: The gut is literally the cornerstone of your health, and injury to the gut can take years or decades to manifest. NSAIDs inevitably cause gut injury, some less, some more – there’s no mere pain or discomfort in the world that’s going to convince me to injure my gut in exchange for an easy out.
*There have been several moments that I will always remember as “leap off the cliff” moments in the realm of health. But very very high on that list is the memory of the day that my wife and I collected all the NSAIDs in the house and toss them in the trash. “But what if?…” Several years later, between homeopathy, NasTea, and approaches that do not rely on drugs, I can confidently state that this was one of the best choices we’ve ever made (we don’t really get many fevers anymore, but it’s worth noting that, in our experience, if the kids do fever it’s never the intense blowup fever. There’s a reason even drug practitioners are getting shy of dispensing NSAIDs, eg here, here, and here – other than ruining the helpful fever response and making parents less worried, there’s really very little observable benefit to giving NSAIDs to kids – and plenty of downsides).
