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8 IBS Treatments Ranked from WORST to BEST! An RN Explains · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you have IBS, there's a good chance you have tried at least three things on this list.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And some of these can make you feel better for a little while.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: But feeling better for a few hours is very different from actually fixing why you keep having diarrhea in the first place.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Brooke Kane, registered nurse and functional medicine practitioner.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And after helping more than 700 people have normal bowel movements again, I have very strong opinions about the way IBS gets treated.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm ranking eight of the most common approaches from the ones I think keep women stuck the longest all the way down to what I actually do with my own clients.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I can already tell you the treatment at number one is not a medication, a supplement, or a diet.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the one that I hate the most, low FODMAP, dead last.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I do not use the low FODMAP diet with my clients.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Women come to me after spending months or even years cutting out onions, garlic, dairy, fruit, bread, gluten, beans, vegetables, and whatever else some chart told them might upset their gut and they still have diarrhea.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they have fewer symptoms when they eat six foods.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when they try to eat normally again?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Everything comes right back.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is symptom management.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: If your gut cannot tolerate food, I want to know why your gut cannot tolerate food.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is there bacterial overgrowth?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Are protective bacteria missing?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is there yeast or a parasite?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is your gut inflamed?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are you producing enough short chain fatty acids?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is digestion working properly?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Low FODMAP doesn't answer any of those questions.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: It just keeps taking food away.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I have women come to me scared to eat because their list of safe foods keeps getting smaller and smaller.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's why low FODMAP is number eight.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Food sensitivity testing and elimination diets, this one is right behind it because it makes the same mistake.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: You take a test and it tells you that you react to eggs, dairy, almonds, chicken, broccoli, whatever.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you stop eating them.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But nobody asks the more important question.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why did your gut suddenly become unable to tolerate foods you used to eat without a problem?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't do food sensitivity testing with my clients, and I don't spend our time trying to hunt down every food trigger because food intolerance is never something random.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Something changed inside that gut.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: If we fix what made the gut reactive in the first place, I routinely see foods stop being the problem.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if your current IBS treatment is basically just becoming better at better at avoiding foods, I rank that near the bottom because eventually you need to be able to eat.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now we get into something that actually works really well at what it was designed to do.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Imodium can slow down your diarrhea.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you need to get on an airplane, go to a wedding, sit through a meeting, or leave your house without panicking about where the bathroom is.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I completely understand why you take this.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is when that becomes your IBS treatment.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: You wake up, you take Imodium, you get through the day, then you do it again tomorrow while nobody's figured out why your body keeps producing the urgent diarrhea in the first place.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: You are controlling the symptom.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're not solving the problem.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I have women come to me who've been doing this for years because their doctor told them IBS was chronic and managing it was the best thing they could do, just take immodium.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I completely reject that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: If your body suddenly started doing something it did not used to do, I want to know why.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So emodium gets number six.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a useful tool in the right situation, but it's a terrible root cause strategy.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Random probiotics.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: This one makes people mad because probiotics have been marketed as the answer to gut health.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have a microbiome problem, take probiotics.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Except you have no idea what's actually living inside your gut yet.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: You might already have bacterial overgrowth.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: You might have the wrong organisms in the wrong amounts.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut may be so inflamed that throwing more bacteria into it is exactly the wrong move at that moment.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: I use probiotics, but I do not blindly hand the same probiotic to every woman that I see.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Timing matters, the strain matters, the condition of the gut matters.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I need to change the environment first.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I need to deal with something else before I even think about rebuilding their bacteria.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the probiotic itself isn't the problem.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Taking one because somebody on the internet said probiotics are good for IBS is the problem.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And number four is where this gets even more expensive.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of women finally get told you have SIBO.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so they think, ah, finally, there's my answer.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So then they take xyfaxin.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they feel better for a little while, but then the symptoms come back and they end up taking it again.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody asks why you got SIBO in the first place.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is my problem with the whole SIBO merry go-round.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Even the breath test gives me very limited information.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: It does not show me the entire gut.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell me all the organisms that are there, what protective species are missing, what the immune system is doing, what the gut lining looks like, or why this environment allowed you to get SIBO in the first place.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So killing or suppressing the bacteria without changing the conditions or fixing the reason you had it there in the first place puts you right back to where you started.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is why I rank this above the first four, because at least somebody recognized that bacteria are somehow involved.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: But if treatment stops there, the investigation stopped way too early.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I've done four of these already and I still have diarrhea, that's exactly who I work with.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the women who come to me have already seen multiple doctors.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: They've tried diets, medications, supplements, sometimes functional medicine already as well.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you're done guessing and you want to actually see what's happening inside your gut, there's a link below to reach out to me.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: We can run the right testing, look at the data, and figure out what needs to happen in your gut and in what order.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're getting into the things I actually use.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Temporarily making food easier on the gut.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Notice I didn't say find your food triggers.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I said make digestion easier for a while.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Those are very different goals.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I do with most of my clients early on is simplify what they're eating.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to use a lot of animal protein, eggs, fish, meat, fruit, and fewer vegetables than most gut programs recommend.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, fewer vegetables.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know that's gonna make some people angry.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I do not believe an already irritated digestive system needs a giant salad, rock ale, 30 grams of roughage because somebody told you that more plants are always better.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: For some of these women, their gut is struggling to digest what they're already eating.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So for a period of time, we make things easier while we work on what is actually wrong.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But this is number three, not number one for a reason.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Diet still cannot tell me what is living inside your gut.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And diet alone can't remove a parasite, rebuild missing bacteria, or tell me whether your immune system is functioning properly.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Calming the nervous system.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is the one people tend to misunderstand.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you that your IBS is caused by stress.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: I actually hate it when people say that.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can have very real dysfunction in your gut and still have a nervous system that's making it a lot harder for that gut to recover.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what years of urgent diarrhea does to you.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: You leave the house and immediately wonder where the bathroom is.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: You get in the car and you worry you're not gonna make it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: You sit down at a restaurant and you wonder what's gonna happen as soon as you eat.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your body has been living on high alert.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I work on calming the anxiety and getting the body out of that constant panic state while we're also dealing with what we found inside of your gut.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: But nervous system work by itself is still not number one.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can't meditate your way out of klebsiella.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can't breathe your way out of a parasite.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the only approach I would put at number one.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Test first, then treat what you actually find.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: This should sound obvious, and somehow it's the thing almost nobody does properly.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Before I decide what someone needs, I want the data.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know which harmful bacteria are there, which beneficial bacteria are missing, what the short chain fatty acids look like.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know whether or not there's yeast, fungus, mold, parasites, other pathogens in there.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: I also want to look at the gut pH, digestive function, the gut lining at a microscopic level, immune function, inflammation, whether toxins are properly getting cleared.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then I build the plan.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this is important because two women can both have the exact same diagnosis of IBSD and need completely different treatments.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: One woman may need us to calm the gut before we can do anything else, while another one needs us to deal with an overgrowth first.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else may have severely depleted protective bacteria that need to be rebuilt before we can do anything else.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: The order makes all the difference.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I have women come to me after they've already done functional medicine and they still have diarrhea.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because they actually had decent testing, they just had the wrong strategy for what the testing showed.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: The test does not fix you.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The supplement doesn't fix you, and the diet doesn't fix you.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The right treatment is the one that matches what is actually wrong inside your gut.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's number one.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look at this entire ranking, there's a pattern.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: The treatments at the bottom mostly ask, how do we make the diarrhea stop today?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: The treatments at the top ask, why did you start having diarrhea in the first place?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what has to change for your gut to function normally again?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Those are completely different goals.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm interested in the second one because I don't want you spending the next 10 years getting better and better at managing your IBS.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to stop organizing your life around bathrooms.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you have done low FODMAP, probiotics, emodium, xyfaxin, elimination diets, functional medicine, and you still have urgent diarrhea, check the link in the description.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to understand why all your tests can stay normal while your gut is clearly anything but normal, watch this next video.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'll show you exactly what those tests are missing.