Most people don’t realise that some 80% of our immune system – our body’s friendly protection army – is found, of all places, in our gut |
Quite rightly so, because this is an important ‘customs point’ between the outside world and the insides of our bodies. If 80% of the world’s armies were stationed in a particular place in the world, one would be right to assume that something of major importance is taking place there and also that any unwarranted provocations could culminate in undesirable and dangerous responses.
So, as poorly digested food molecules and microorganisms pass into our blood through the damaged villi, the immune system, like a good defending army, does what it is intended to do and in various ways attacks the unwanted transgressors. Nothing wrong with any of this, actually it keeps us alive. However, if this transgression through the disabled villi – and the need for the immune system to continuously deal with this extra unintended work – becomes too demanding, long lasting or heavily focused, the immune system responses will become equally aggressive. This means releasing higher than desirable levels of immune substances in our blood and tissues which can and usually do become problematic, not just for the toxins but also for our unsuspecting body organs.
This provocation of the immune system causes a demand for extra soldiers and monitoring agents, spies, to be present at the border, due to the excessive arrival of unrecognised aliens through the broken gaps in the intestinal barrier.
The immune system then engages in the activity it was created for, to attack and kill these potentially dangerous aliens, for the purpose of defending us from any harm they could cause. Whilst in worldly confrontations of this magnitude there would probably be guns, bullets and bombs, the protagonists in this battle are a complicated array of immune responses which include the release of inflammatory agents such as histamine.
These exaggerated immune defensive activities, and the release of inflammatory agents, at first will more than likely make us susceptible to developing different levels of the more common types of allergies. Some people seem to become more prone or sensitive to sinus conditions, some to asthma, others to different types of respiratory and skin allergies.
Over the years we have successfully helped countless cases of skin problems, such as eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, acne and rosacea without ever, ever, using any creams or other skin treatments. Many of the patients will have seen skin specialists, who will have often recommended anti-inflammatory drugs, perhaps gaining some immediate but usually not lasting results.
Whilst anti-inflammatory medicines will calm down some of the overreacting immune system activities and thus improve the symptoms of the respiratory or skin allergy, it will not cure what in my and many others opinion and experience is usually the true cause of the inflammation or the aggravation of the inflammation, the leakage through the intestinal wall.
I normally refer to skin problems and other allergies as red lights shining on the instrument panel of a car. They are not the causative problem, they simply alert us that there is some kind of a problem under the car’s bonnet |
It is not sufficient to only cover or remove the warning lights on the dashboard, otherwise the purpose of the warning will probably go ignored while the real problem may remain untreated and risks eventually becoming more than a simple disturbance.
This inflammation manifests itself in the form of a variety of different conditions in many people, such as digestive complaints, joint and muscular pain, fatigue, difficulty with focusing, mood changes and the usual seasonal allergies.
Other times, the sufferer of an overactive immune system may not be afflicted with or be aware of any particular allergies. However, there is always a very real risk that the overstimulated and belligerent immune system may actually make mistakes and confuse healthy tissue organs, such as for example the thyroid, with some kind of alien molecule which should not have, but did, pass the damaged walls of the intestinal barrier.
The immune system would now have learned how to attack this type of molecule or pathogen, which may have had some similar characteristics in common with the thyroid tissue and it now starts thinking that the thyroid is also an alien that’s needs attacking. Gradually, the poor innocent attacked thyroid becomes damaged by antibodies from our immune system and begins either producing too much or too little of the important, metabolism-regulating hormones it is meant to secrete into the blood, sometimes leading to hypo- (Hashimoto’s) or hyper- (Graves’ disease) thyroidism, classed as autoimmune diseases.
There is a long list of some 80 or more autoimmune diseases that create a multitude of different problems and suffering, and in general terms they all have to do with an overaggressive or mistaken immune system attacking the otherwise healthy organs in our bodies which it was meant to protect – all more or less acting as in the above example used to describe the thyroid disease.
Autoimmune conditions are quickly becoming a scourge of the modern world and are estimated to affect a staggering 50 million Americans |
They include conditions such as reactive arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, scleroderma, Sjogren’s syndrome, vitiligo, several gut conditions such as celiac disease, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and the list goes on and on. The medical treatment for those autoimmune conditions often requires the prolonged use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSID’s), corticosteroids, immunosuppressants and painkillers. Again, these drugs, like almost all others, are capable of serious side effects. They will generally alleviate the symptoms but in the longer run, at times, the side effects may be worse than the condition they were intended to treat.
Case Study no. 8 – Shelley’s personal testimonial. When I found Bruno Marevich I had very severe allergies and hay fever that were gradually getting worse and impacting heavily on the life of not only myself, but my family. I could even hardly do anything, or go anywhere outside, as I would be ill for the rest of the day/week. Bruno’s diagnosis of me was astoundingly accurate. He asked me to tell him in one sentence only what the main issue was that I was coming to him for. Then using iridology, he began to accurately list all the heath issues I had and even some past issues. He claimed that he could help me with these, and he was correct. I began the detox treatment right away. This involved a combination of supplements and diet and lifestyle adjustments, The Marevich Way. The more dedicated you are to following the regime, the better the results. It is an adjustment at the start, but becomes a normal lifestyle as you go along. A couple of weeks after starting this treatment I found that I was not needing the array of hay fever and allergy medications that I had been surviving on for years. Six months later I have almost forgotten about the pile of things I was previously taking to just ‘survive’. Such a dramatic change! There were many other benefits too I began losing weight, something I hadn’t been able to do, no matter what I tried for years. In fact I was just continually putting on weight even when I tried to lose it. Six months later, I now have lost a total of 17 kg. Also, my immune system has kicked into action again. I no longer get every bug that is going around. My circulation has vastly improved. Bloating, a continuous upset tummy and diarrhoea has disappeared and my energy has returned. I feel like I have a new lease of life. My husband was so impressed with the results I got that he began changing his eating habits and he has lost 5 kg now too. My daughter has been seeing Bruno as well with similar dramatic results. Thanks Bruno. Shelley S. |
COMMENTS: Shelley’s rapid improvement from her allergies, her improved energy, younger and fitter appearance and healthy weight loss can be again attributed to the cascade of benefits that occur when the digestive tract and blood-sugar metabolism are assisted to work in the way they were intended to. Shelley’s determination to get better after not having really felt on top of the world for some time, and sticking well to her treatment protocol, The Marevich Way, caused her to quickly see improvements after improvements. A great achievement and a very motivational case, as Shelley’s improvements also motivated her daughter, who I also see as a patient, to improve her own health. These days they are both finding it normal to enjoy healthy foods and take a maintenance dosage of health sustaining and disease preventing natural supplements. |
This is what can happen once our digestive and absorption dysfunctions have upset parts of this vital agent in our body, the immune system, our police force, bodyguard and army that has been made responsible for protecting us against nasty viruses, bugs, all kinds of toxins and damage. The companion with whom on our side we have walked confidently through places that contain diseases such as hospitals, and who has protected us since when we were little children playing happily and digging the dirt in the ground with our bare fingers. It is now doing something which we would never really expect a friend and protector, to whom we owe so much gratitude for looking after our best interests for most of our lives, to do.
Well, the immune system should not really be blamed, as it is usually not the culprit but really the victim, whose great power for good has been damaged mainly by modern day foods, stress, environmental factors and the overuse of potent medicinal drugs.
But the problems do not end here because the damaged, leaking villi, do not only allow the passage of bad stuff into the blood – to add insult to injury they also block the passage of important nutrients which would normally get through without any problems, often causing subclinical, and thus often not easily detectable, malnutrition.
In my clinic I will usually no longer bother, unless I think it appropriate, to do all kinds of test to see if we can figure out exactly what the patient is not absorbing when I also suspect villi damage. Just supplementing the patient with the ingredient they aren’t currently absorbing is no guarantee that the patient will be able to absorb enough or any of these anyway.
Very often, the damaged villi could fail to absorb many nutrients including B group vitamins, certain amino acids, essential fatty acids, iron, calcium, etc., etc., and there is no single organ in our bodies, including our very important heart and brain, that will not risk becoming seriously impaired.
We could walk through any hospital anywhere in the world and look at the medical history and profile of each and every patient in every ward, the cardiac ward, cancer ward, renal and dialysis wards even the psychiatric, neurology and emergency wards, and find out that with the exception of the maternity ward and some patients in the emergency ward, most beds would have never been occupied if that person or their health care provider had taken good care of their digestive tract along the lines explained in this book. Also, a large percentage of the remaining hospital patients could be safely dismissed if sent home and had these disease causing digestive factors worked on, as they would gradually be overcoming the real reason for their having become ill in the first place.
That is also why practically every person walking through a health practitioner’s door will almost certainly be also burdened with digestive issues, sometimes for many years, and yet they will have rarely, if ever, been diagnosed or treated. These issues will almost certainly be the not-so-obvious, real, original causes of the seemingly unrelated health problems they have come to seek assistance for. If not, whatever the original cause of the condition, such as perhaps a virus or some other form of infection or injury, a well-functioning and unburdened digestive system will always promote better, more complete, faster healing and recovery for most patients
For a multitude of reasons, most people either do not chew their food adequately, or their stomachs are not capable of producing good quality and quantity HCl, or have poor bile production due to sluggish livers, or lack in the essential nutrients which are required for their pancreas to produce copious amounts of health bringing digestive enzymes and bicarbonates – or perhaps even all of the above. Add a diet containing a multitude of refined foods with unhealthy and sometimes dangerous additives, and possessing little if any nutritional value, drinks, stresses, a vast variety of prescribed or over the counter medicinal drugs and, ouch, what a mess we have.
This may sound amazing and perhaps even hard to believe but it is very much so. Not only I, but countless other naturopaths and professional complementary health care practitioners, scientists and professors will have records of patients they have treated or researched and studied with such conditions. In our case, over the last three decades we have been fortunate to been able to assist restore good health in tens of thousands of people where normal medicines did not appear to have been able to, by prioritising the correct, health producing and maintaining function of the digestive tract.
The aim of every good health practitioner should always be to help their patients achieve a level of actual healing and not just relief, to minimise recovery time, reduce the patients need for drugs and give them, wherever possible, even greater health benefits, rather than just fixing the problems that brought them to their clinics. This should also be an opportune time to empower the patient whilst they are there, with valuable information to help them and their families prevent future similar or related health problems.
Treat the causes, not just the symptoms. How much healthier would our world be if this were to happen? |
But the greatest irony of them all is that all of these bad bacteria in the intestine will more likely than not also produce certain amounts of bloating causing gasses. Some patients get so bad that they report getting bloated with almost anything that goes into their mouths, even water.
The pressure from this bloating can travel upwards as well as downwards. The upward travel finds a natural blockage, the valve or sphincter, that locks the acid inside the stomach. However, if we have overeaten – and sometimes also without eating but have perhaps done some lifting – the gas manages to escape through the weakened sphincter, pick up what little acid most people have in their stomachs, and splash it up past the stomach into the oesophagus.
This reflux condition will generally create some burning and discomfort but not always so. Some forms of reflux are silent and may only affect our throats, teeth or breathing. Others are not silent at all and can cause such sharp abdominal or chest discomfort that may easily at times be confused as a heart attack. Either way, your doctor will usually diagnose it as reflux and recommend that you take antacids or medication referred to as proton-pump-inhibitors which pretty much stop your stomach, which was not producing much acid to start with, from producing any more real usable amounts of required acid.
So, whilst the medication may help relieve the symptoms in many cases, it is actually making the real cause of the problem even worse. Now, the stomach is producing even lesser quantities of acid and is failing to digest food even more that it used to before, encouraging even greater overgrowth of bad bacteria, greater passage of unwanted molecules and toxins into the bloodstream, making it even more difficult to absorb the good essential nutrients and weakening and damaging our health even more.
Case Study no 9. – Zdenka’s personal testimonial. I started seeing Bruno after years of living with really bad bloating and it was starting to really affect my everyday life. I tried to eliminate foods from my diet that I thought were causing my bloating with no such luck. In the end I was so frustrated about my constant pregnant-looking belly that a friend suggested I go see Bruno, as she had seen him for similar symptoms. So I finally made an appointment with Bruno and it was the best thing that I’ve done for my health. Thinking that I was fit and thinking I was eating mostly healthily, Bruno made me see that I wasn’t eating the right foods, and that was why my bloating was never subsiding. After suggesting I be on a balanced diet, plus taking the natural supplements, I started noticing a big change with my bloating, it was subsiding dramatically and to top it off I was losing weight (all in all I lost nearly ten kg) without trying! Now after nearly three years I still see Bruno every few months. I’ve kept my bloating at bay, and have maintained my weight loss, and have implemented my healthy eating with my family at mealtimes. Zdenka D. |
COMMENTS: As in Zdenka’s case, abdominal bloating is a sign that our gastrointestinal tract is filled with air or gas creating a feeling of fullness and tightness leading to swelling or distention of the abdomen and is sometimes accompanied with pain, flatulence, rumblings and burping or reflux. With Zdenka, some RRR (remove the bad bacteria, replace it with good bacteria and repair the lining of the intestines) made rapid improvements to the symptoms, even though it took several months to achieve good repair and stability of her digestive tract. These disturbances can become so regularly bothersome as to eventually cause people’s abdomens to become very easily distended after eating just about anything. Whilst bloating is normally reported as just an uncomfortable nuisance, it is really a warning that there is some degree of imbalance in progress in our intestines which could well be affecting our overall health, University studies have found that people suffering with bloating take more sick days, have to see their doctor more frequently and take more medications than the average person.
Bloating is something that you should not simply disregard, even if you consider it as just an annoyance. It could be a warning light trying to make you aware of certain food intolerances or sensitivities or even more serious conditions such as tumours, celiac disease, pancreatic insufficiency or even ovarian cancer. |
Practically every patient that I have ever seen who was taking acid-inhibiting drugs has no longer required them, and been able to stop taking them in a few weeks and often much sooner and have never had to go back to taking them again.
How do I do that? It is often as easy as 123 or ‘RRR’.
- Remove, using natural means that do not harm the good bacteria, the bad bacteria, fungi, yeast and mould from the digestive tract.
There are many herbs and vitamins that will help do this. We find that using our formula, which contains the combination of a very potent dosage of active garlic extracts and horseradish combined with natural anti-inflammatories such as fenugreek, quercetin and bromelains, will get rid of most bad bacterial and fungal overgrowth, including help control the dreaded ulcer-forming helicobacter pylori.
- Replace or replenish the existing low counts of good bacterial organisms with appropriate amounts of health-giving good bacteria. Our preferred probiotic formula has high counts of colony forming units (CFUs) of the right strains of acidophilus, bifidobacterium longum, and higher than commonly available counts of bulgaricus, and also importantly contains prebiotics such as oligo fructose, which provides nourishment for the live encapsulated bacteria, and facilitates its prolonged survival, as well as their colonisation and growth in the small intestine.
- Repair the damaged villi, the mucosal lining and thus the immune capacity of the intestine. A combination of herbs will generally be able to help achieve this, such as slippery elm bark, aloe vera, fennel, ginger, liquorice, white willow bark, chlorella and guar gum, a mucopolysaccharide which in powder form helps coat and repair the cells and tissues lining the intestine.
While the total number of living cells that make up the living organs in our bodies is difficult to estimate, because of their differing sizes and concentrations in different organs, and many studies have proposed different numbers, it is probably not too wrong to estimate that there are a staggering 100 trillion living cells in our bodies, all with specific needs and functions and requiring proper nutrition and energy management.
Imagine you’re being the owner of trillions and trillions of little factories, all responsible for different functions, each working independently, at full steam, each equipped with all the machinery and systems to enable them to perform their important job, and yet all synchronising and cooperating to achieve the grand goal of a healthy life.
If the figure of 100 trillion living cells sounds like a figure that we may not even be able to grasp in our minds, then consider that we also have an estimated quantity of intestinal microorganisms, which is some ten times higher!
The biological soil of our gut is comparable to that of a healthy, massive garden, beaming with life and activity. We are really the rulers of our own massive, purposeful universe and we are also born with an innate desire of being a good and wise ruler, which we further develop as we experience and learn from life. A good ruler has a deep interest over the running of his massive domain, and endeavours to protect it from questionable outside influences and enemies, and also seeks to learn how to make better informed, more valuable decisions that bring peace and prosperity to his subjects.
Therefore, as far as you can, keep this private universe well maintained with your best intentions for it, and expose it to the most beneficial and natural products that you think will be of benefit and not harm.
Digestion, followed by Absorption, Circulation and Excretion. If there is a breakdown or inefficiency in this continuum, different diseases could eventually manifest anywhere in the body |
If your digestive tract is not healthy, neither is the rest of your body. If healing is at a standstill, look at the digestive tract to see if it is holding you back from getting healthier.
At least, in a simplified way, this is how our digestion and absorption process was intended to and should work for good energy, health and wellbeing.
Case Study no. 10 – Lyn’s personal testimonial. A few years back I spent more time in hospital than I did at home. I was suffering from an allergic reaction to an antibiotic prescribed to me. I was unable to travel far from home and working was becoming increasingly difficult.
The doctors prescribed stronger and stronger medication, all unsuccessful. I took to the internet and found Bruno’s website and decided to give him a go. The effects were almost immediate, I was back in control and I’ve never felt more alive. My colleagues at work are amazed when I don’t come down with colds and the flu. I can’t thank Bruno enough for restoring my health and keeping me well. Lyn M. |
COMMENTS: Lyn is yet another example of the negative side effects that antibiotics can cause in almost anyone. Getting rid of bad bacteria aggressively with antibiotics is at times comparable to trying to bring world peace by dropping an atomic bomb on a nation who has more dissidents than peace-loving, productive people. It will quickly get rid of the good people as well as the bad ones, but that could just be the start of a long time of discords that could also affect many other countries. Continuing to drop more atomic bombs will make it harder and harder for stability and peace to be ever reached. In many patients, including Lyn, an unhappy intestine affects the immune system negatively, sometimes almost immediately, and this can lead to a vast variety of immune reactions, including respiratory, skin and intestinal distress. An immune system caught up in such a civil war will usually be far less able to protect the body from outside opportunistic invaders such as colds and the flu, or other allergies such as sinusitis or asthma. There is only a thin border between the outside and inside world. If that border gets broken, you can expect responses from your immune system. |
