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You’re Using Imodium WRONG: Fix Diarrhea This Way · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Imodium can make chronic diarrhea look fixed when all you've really done is put it on mute for a few hours.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly why people get stopped taking it.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: But taking immodium long term to stop diarrhea is one of the worst things you could be doing for your gut.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you take imodium once in a while because you have a flight, a wedding, or a day you absolutely can't afford a bowel emergency, that's fine.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if you need it every day just to function, that's something else entirely.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because the more often you use it, the more likely you are to deal with things like constipation, bloating, cramping, slowing down the bowel too much.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And at very excessive, constant doses, especially when people start taking more than recommended, there are also some pretty serious cardiac risks.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, that is not even the part that bothers me the most.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The bigger problem is that immodium can work well enough to let you postpone the same question for another year.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why the hell do you still have diarrhea every day?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Brookeine, a registered nurse and functional medicine practitioner specializing in chronic urgent diarrhea.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna show you where immodium actually makes sense, where people start using it wrong, and what I would do if I were you, if I wanted to eliminate bathroom emergencies without needing medication every time you leave the house.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So let me get this out of the way first because I know how these videos usually go.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna spend 10 minutes telling you that immodium is poison.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: It slows intestinal movement, and sometimes that's exactly what you need for a minute.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Where I start to have a problem is when something that was supposed to help you get through an occasional bad day becomes the thing that you need in order to have a normal day at all.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And somehow women can live like that for years.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: They take Imodium before work, they take it before they go out to dinner, they take it before a long drive, they keep some in their purse, some in the car, some in their suitcase, because God forbid they get caught somewhere without it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually that starts to feel normal.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: It is not normal.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It is just a very organized way to have chronic diarrhea.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is the part I think people who have never had chronic diarrhea completely underestimate.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You get really good at adapting.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: You stop eating before flights, you wake up early enough to have a bunch of bowel movements before work, you don't book your first appointment of the day until after 11.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know which restaurants have bathrooms close to the table, you know which gas stations you can run in and trust.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: You carry Imodium because leaving it at home feels reckless and irresponsible.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And because you have figured out how to survive, everybody assumes that you're doing okay.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, your entire life is being negotiated around your colon.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is the part that I want to change.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do not just want you to poop less.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to be able to leave your house without doing a risk assessment first.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And once imodium becomes part of the routine, people start accepting the explanation that goes with it.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: My gut just moves too fast.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: You take immodium, it slows everything down.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So somebody says, Well, you have IBSD.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut just moves too fast.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a motility problem.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that describes what's happening.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It does not explain why it's happening.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Bile can irritate the colon and create watery diarrhea.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Inflammation can make the bowels more reactive.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Poor digestion can change what reaches the colon.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your bacterial environment can be completely disrupted.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can have several layers of this happening together.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if every one of those women takes imodium, they may all feel better for a few hours.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: That does not mean they all have the same problem.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It means they all found a medication that slows the symptom down.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I don't care nearly as much that immodium works as I care about what keeps forcing you to use it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, I probably use Immodium a lot more than once in a while, there is a link below to learn more about working with me.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the women who come to me have already done a lot.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: They've changed their diets, they've tried low FODMAP, taken supplements, had colonoscopies, blood work.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they've already spent thousands of dollars in functional medicine, yet somehow they are still standing in the kitchen before a normal day deciding whether they should take immodium just in case.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: That is when I want to stop helping you work around the diarrhea and figure out why it keeps happening.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: If that sounds like you, check the link below because the way your diarrhea behaves before you take immodium can actually give us some very useful clues.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you take immodium automatically every time the diarrhea starts, it's easy to stop noticing what the diarrhea is actually doing.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Even just calling it diarrhea is too vague.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's morning diarrhea, post-meal diarrhea, greasy diarrhea, yellow, orange, and each of those are different clues.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Symptoms are signals.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's the body's way of telling you that something is wrong in here.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is it worse in the morning?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Does every meal set it off?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do higher fat foods make it worse?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Did this start after your gallbladder was removed?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is the stool watery, yellow, greasy, full of mucus?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Those details matter because they point us in different directions.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you to stop taking a modium and spend the next week suffering so you can study your poop.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you not to treat every episode like the exact same generic IBS problem.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: If your diarrhea has a pattern, your body's trying to tell you what you need to know in order to solve it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is that most conventional doctors don't speak that language at all.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that most conventional doctors aren't trained to read those patterns the way I do.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking for things like infection, bleeding, ulcers, tumors, obvious structural problems.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if those tests come back normal, a lot of women get handed the IBSD label and imodium.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where the investigation stops.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And just take imodium is terrible advice for someone with chronic diarrhea.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: But nothing dangerous showed up or your labs are normal, and we actually figured out why you have diarrhea and now know how to stop it from coming back, are not the same thing.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're still taking immodium every day after a normal colonoscopy, normal blood work, normal basic stool tests, I would not assume this is just how your life has to look forever.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: What I do is differently.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It looks at the pattern first.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Then we use a more comprehensive and advanced test to figure out what's actually creating the diarrhea.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know whether bile's part of it.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is there inflammation?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is digestion breaking down what the bacterial environment looks like?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is there harmful bacteria your body's been trying to flush out?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a bunch of yeast, mold, fungus in there that you're trying to get rid of?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then treat the thing that is actually there instead of just slowing the bowel down again.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got mold, yeast, fungus, parasites, harmful bacteria, diarrhea occurs because your body's incredibly smart and it's trying to flush it out.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when we force our bowels to hold that stuff in there with immodium?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is just one reason I hate the take immodium advice from doctors.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a terrible long-term solution.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I solved this issue for myself and I've helped hundreds of women do the same.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So no, I don't accept your labs are normal, keep taking immodium as the end of the story, and you shouldn't either.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you use immodium once in a while for a flight, wedding, long drive, or a day where you absolutely can't risk a bowel emergency, fine.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we have to do what we have to do.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're taking it every day or most days, that is where I would stop treating it like a solution and start treating the frequency itself as a sign that this needs a deeper look.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because at that point, the goal should not be to get better at timing your imodium.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: The goal should be to knead it less.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that starts by figuring out why your diarrhea behaves the way it does in the first place.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is really the whole takeaway.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're considering low FODMAP to try to figure this out on your own, watch this video next.