Do you suffer from excessive wind and bloating? Perhaps you have a tendency towards constipation, or diarrhea, or maybe you alternate between both? Perhaps you have been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)? Or perhaps you have had no formal diagnosis but your daily life is hampered by frequent churning in the abdomen, or the pain of trapped wind? Do you feel that what is going on in your gut is affecting your mood, your energy levels and your ability to think clearly and enjoy life? You’re probably fed up with trying to identify which foods are affecting you and you may even have got to the point where it seems that everything you eat makes you feel ill.
Lorraine has been helping people with these types of complaints for almost 20 years and during that time has also completed further gastrointestinal education, including the Institute of Functional Medicine’s Advanced Practice Module on ‘improving gastrointestinal function’, as well as specialist SIBO training.
Even if you don’t suffer from debilitating gut symptoms, it’s worth knowing that many illnesses are affected by what goes on in the GI tract. There are now scientifically proposed links between gastro-intestinal problems and whole-body diseases like allergies, auto-immune arthritic conditions, mental health issus and cardiovascular disease. Sometimes, these sorts of gastro-intestinal problems may go unnoticed because they do not necessarily produce obvious symptoms. This is why we use specific laboratory tests to identify these more latent problems. It may be, for example, that you have a problem with the health of the gut’s mucus barrier, whose job it is to keep toxins in the gut from getting into the blood stream. Or, you could have an overgrowth of unhelpful bugs in the gut, or a depletion of the friendly bugs that we need to keep us healthy. (Did you know that the bacteria and yeasts that we carry in our gastro-intestinal tract and elsewhere, far outnumber our own human cells?) We can organise stool tests, urine tests and breath tests to identify what is going on.
Note that the service offered in no way replaces that provided by medical experts. Lorraine is not a doctor. Rather, she is a registered nutritionist and nutritional therapist, and thus her work complements, rather than replaces, medical advice. If you suspect you may have signs and symptoms of an underlying disease process, you should see your doctor for medical investigations.