Gut Health and Brain Health

Transcription

Bill Gasiamis 0:00
Bill from recoveryafterstroke.com. So it’s taken me a long time to find somebody that’s going to help me with the challenges I have in my gut.

I’ve been feeling bloated and gassy for a very long time, even up to a couple of years and I’ve been to so many different doctors, gastroenterologist I’ve done all the tests, and they kind of tell me that there’s something wrong, but that’s about it.

Bill Gasiamis 0:27
There’s nothing else we can do about it. When I talk about stroke recovery i have to talk about gut health and gut health is really important to help heal the brain. And if your gut is inflamed, it’s likely that you’re going to experience a lot more fatigue and challenges with healing the brain after stroke. Now, what a lot of people don’t know is that dopamine and serotonin, the two neurotransmitters created mainly in the gut and are taken up to the brain to be used by the brain when it’s necessary.

Bill Gasiamis 0:48
Now dopamine regulates mood and muscle movement and plays a vital role in the brain’s pleasure and reward systems. Whereas serotonin helps to regulate mood, body temperature and appetite. If you’ve got an unhealthy gut, that is likely that dopamine and serotonin production is going to be decreased. So in years gone by I went out and discovered what it is I could do to help heal my brain and some of those things that I did include becoming gluten-free, eating less sugar, consuming less caffeine, eating less dairy, so that I can minimize the possibility that I could create inflammation and therefore negatively impact my brain.

Bill Gasiamis 1:46
Now, no matter how much effort I put into doing that the challenges that I had, for my bloated gut and more inflamed and swollen gut never seem to go away and the diagnosis was that perhaps there was something else going on with bad gut bacteria. But nobody was able to help me do anything about it. So what caused this situation for me with regards to this unhealthy level of bad gut bacteria in my gut?

Bill Gasiamis 2:15
Well, it happened after thyroid surgery a couple of years after my brain surgery. And the doctor that I met recently basically confirmed my suspicion that the antibiotics used in the surgery might have messed up my gut bacteria. And they haven’t recovered since that happened in 2016. And it’s been nearly four years since that thyroid surgery.

Bill Gasiamis 2:41
So it’s really interesting that almost no matter what I did to help heal the gut, I was facing a very difficult task. frustratingly, I continued to try and find solutions on my own because I was going to doctors, and I was getting dead ends, I was finding myself in the same place often, which was that there was no solution to be offered or no additional support other than you kind of have to live with it.

Bill Gasiamis 3:10
And you have to completely change your diet and your lifestyle to make it less likely that your gut is going to bloat. So why am I telling you all this, well it’s important that your gut health gets looked after after stroke, that’s definitely the most one of the most important things to healing the brain. But it’s also important that if you don’t get where you want to go with the current health professional that you’re looking at, or the people that you’re going to for support, then keep looking.

Bill Gasiamis 3:37
I have had third, fourth and fifth opinions about this situation with my gut. And I think I finally just found somebody that is going to be able to support my gut and overcome these bad gut bacteria and deal with them so that we can replace them with good gut bacteria and get me back to a place I was a few years ago before all these challenges happened.

Bill Gasiamis 4:02
So what’s the moral of the story? Firstly, it’s obviously heal your gut after stroke, make sure that you’re doing the best to heal the gut after stroke. Because a healthy gut means a healthy brain. But then also if you’re not happy with the current doctor, or medical professional that you’re dealing with, ask to get another opinion, ask or seek somebody out and keep seeking other people, until you find the right person that’s going to help you with your specific problems. So that you can overcome whatever it is that’s happening to you.