Gut Health Matters in Chronic Illness

Update 2026: the health of the gut and microbiome has only become more central to all I’ve learned as time passes. The microbiome is foundational to all health and well-being and thus to all dis-ease and illness. It is what we are made of and it’s critically important.

There is an article from a couple of days ago on Mad in America on the importance of gut health for mental well-being by Jill Littrell, PhD. I got engaged in the comments following the post. I’m going to share my comments below. Creating gut health has been critically important to my healing process and I’ve seen it be critically important to 1000s of others in both my chronic illness healing circles as well as my psych drug withdrawal circles.

I’m going to start this post with my final comment from the dialogue at Mad in America because I want to underscore that healing my gut has led me to understand this:

“I take the (unfortunately) radical perspective that as human animals we have the capacity to know all manner of things by instinct. It is in our DNA and manifests via intuition. This is not magic. It is not a super-power. We are “psychic” by nature.  It is our human inheritance. We have forgotten how to access our very nature. That is all. And as complicated as we might like to make the conundrum we are faced with right now, it’s also pretty simple. We need only pay attention.“

Then I thanked Jill Littrell for sharing her academic study. I also make some comments that refer back to other comments made in the comment thread which you can see in its entirety here for context:

Thank you, Jill, Tending to the gut is one of the most fundamental issues that everyone who lacks general well-being, whether physically or mentally manifested can do to build a foundation of wellness.

This doesn’t change the fact that “shit happens” in our environments (trauma etc) …what it does is help provide an internal capacity to better meet that shit.

My own healing journey has made it profoundly clear that healing the gut and optimizing diet is a place to start in tandem with understanding trauma (what happened to us) … in tandem because they are inseparable, truly.

Everything matters…when starting the process of unraveling how it all fits together in our own idiosyncratic lives having a healthy body matters. One cannot have a healthy body without a healthy gut.

**as a side note, my gut’s health was destroyed by (completely unnecessary) longterm antibiotic therapy for (mild) acne in my teenage years. In my own trajectory it’s clear to me now that this set me up for everything that followed…prior to the psych meds, the antibiotics were the gateway into general dis – ease which led to drugs (psychiatric and others too) and more drugs which ended up destroying my wellbeing. It’s been in healing the gut with optimal diets and probiotics etc along with becoming drug free that I have found well-being once again.

Someone had an issue with what I said and implied that my experience alone doesn’t mean much, so I then said:

“it’s not based on just my experience but also the 1000s I have the honor to interact with online…those with both physical and mental health issues….

the chronic illness circles have a spectrum of the entire population on them including many with psychiatric diagnosis….there is actually a lot of research that already backs this up as well…and we do read it in tandem with learning to listen to and experience our bodies and knowing instruments that can lead us in the right direction to heal.

all the things you mention are also critically important…but not more or less. of course different people need different things at different times…that’s true. when I suggested a starting point I meant in a clinical setting where those things are considered…in the end every path is unique but all these things are parts of what make us human animals on a planet intimately intertwined with everything including the bugs in our guts.

I personally don’t need studies to know what I know.

My body knows and so do the bodies of 1000s of folks I’ve interacted. You certainly don’t have to believe us, but you will not silence us. Healing is too critically important to wait around for the establishment to get their heads on straight. Still as mentioned above I do utilize the science that is already available and there is actually quite a lot. Data helps the intuitive process. I’m not anti-science, I simply don’t rely on it alone.

Internal guidance and intuition are real things that can lead us to what we need…and that, does, also, indeed look different for everyone. And so we may differ here and that is just fine.

and ha ha ha…as if I lived in a vacuum…I learned this stuff from others…I didn’t make it up…we are everywhere. We are transforming our lives.“

Someone else mentioned that understanding about healing the gut was part of Chinese medicine that has been around for thousands of years.

So I responded:

yes…Hippocrates too said:

“All disease begins in the gut.”

these aren’t things we as human beings don’t know…it’s stuff that western medicine hasn’t yet proven…

many of us, however, already know.

Indeed Ayurvedic medicine too (age-old Indian medicine) also concentrates on healing the gut.

I will finish this post how I started.

I take the (unfortunately) radical perspective that as human animals we have the capacity to know all manner of things by instinct. It is in our DNA and manifests via intuition. This is not magic. It is not a super-power. We are “psychic” by nature.  It is our human inheritance. We have forgotten how to access our very nature. That is all. And as complicated as we might like to make the conundrum we are faced with right now, it’s also pretty simple. We need only pay attention.

Healing my gut was a large part of discovering that truth.

More on Beyond Meds see:  Mental health and diet: nutrition and gut health

• Microbiome and chronic illness (Lyme, etc)
• The gut microbiota and ancestry (depressive symptoms)
• The microbiome and healing diets

***

Support Everything Matters: Beyond Meds. Make a donation with PayPal or if you’d like to contribute to food as medicine, a Kroger eGift card works too!