Dr SSM's Health, Disease& journey to Fix Gut Health.

Welcome to DrSSM's website where you will get to read about health, disease, nutrition and discovering ways to fix our gut health! The reason why you may have decided to explore this website is either because you are healthy and just getting healthy life style tips. Or perhaps you want to learn about how good nutrition may help pervent diseases. Or maybe you are amongst those, like myself who are going through health problems...looking for natural ways to heal. 

Sometimes I have wondered if I will every be disease free? Just like me, maybe you have also been to see so many physicians and spent your life savings to get treated, only to find you ended up back to where you started. Well if that sounds very familiar, join the family! I believe that we can do a lot to more to improve our lifestyle and quality of life, even we suffer with chronic conditions. Over the years there was something I started saying to myself. My health condition does not control me, rather I have the control over it. It helped me develop a positive mindset. Not only that, I changed the word 'cope' to 'live. So rather than I was coping with my health conditions, I started to say that I live with these conditions. Furthermore, when I reached a stage where I felt that there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel, I did not want to give up. This lead me to start studying nutrition and then I knew I had found the pieces of the missing puzzle. I knew that I microbiome was a cruicial key and I needed to understand it, look after it and improve it in order to to prevent other inflammatory diseases. It also gave me hope that some of my exisiting conditions may start to improve!

I created my website as a platform where I decided to share my own experience of disease and how I really wanted to find answers to many problems that I was suffering with. Where relevant, I have shared my research, studies I came across, the treatments that I may have used, my own experience of treatment success or failure. I plan to share my journey and hope to unveil the hurdles of regaining good health. As mentioned above, I started finding the answers to my problems by studying nutrition and looking at countless published studies. After almost 15 years of studying nutrition, I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel for my own health problems. I realised that one of the keys to fix my health was to fix my gut health which required fixing my microbiome. I hope that sharing my own experiences on this platform will allow people to relate to what I went throught and perhaps it will also help people develop a positive outlook with their own health issues.

My website contains a mix of informative scientific text as well as various health tips which I found useful in my own journey. My opinions are inferences based on clinical evidence and research, my own experience in clinical practice as a primary care Physician, as well as my own personal experiences of health and disease. These opinions aim to be informative and educational purpose only and in no way do they replace advice from your own medical professional. I hope my webiste will help people feel connected to someone else who has been in the same boat. This was one of my assets in my clinical practice. When you are in the same boat, then empathy becomes second nature. My content does not aim to replace any health professional adivce at all so please keep that in mind when you read my content. I would recommend you always contact your own primary care doctor, should you wish to follow any of the content that I write about. I hope the text will make people think more about their nutrition and how it may have an impact on their current health. I hope to even bring a fun element in to this  such as adding some of my favourite health recipes! If you wish to follow my recipes please follow my instagram account @drssm_fixguthealth. I only started that very recently by finally overcoming my social media shyness.

So...why discuss health, disease, nutrition and gut health? Simply put, because they are all connected. There is so much information availalbe on other platforms which varies and can be confusing to a lay person. It was confusing for me too! You will find a variation in opinion even between the experts! And strangely enough there was a lot that I read up on in which I started to disagree with some experts. Like me there are many doctors who are beginning to think differently...more holistically, more laterally, and really wanting to get to the bottom of things. I feel that physicians these days are sometimes just handing out prescriptions like sweets and to be honest it is more because there are too many time constraints in a 10 minute GP consultation. A lot of the times they are treating symptoms! We need to find the cause. Not everything needs a concoction of drugs!

From my experience in medicine for over 25 years and my passion to study nutrition, I have reached a conclusion that the statement "we are what we eat" makes full sense, whether it is seen from a layman's point of view or scientifically. Did Hippocrates not say something on the same lines? He said; "Let medicine be thy food and food be thy medicine." This concept is now backed up by countless scientific research. What we eat can change our metabolism, immune response, brain health and has an impact on our overall health. How is that? Here I am talking about our gut microbiome, which is discussed in depth in the Microbiome section. You will find that a lot of my discussions will make some connections to the microbiome. A healthy diet is connected to a healthy gut which causes a happy microbiome. A happy microbiome reduces inflammatory processes in the body. We have known for the past many years of research that many disesases such as diabetes, cardiovascucular, gut related disorders and cancer are all in fact inflammatory diseases. So the key to good health is to understand our microbiome and look after the microbiome as we would any VIP. Without them we would not surive!

Let us take a simple example of sugar. We all know that too much sugar is not good for Diabetes or the experts have always recommended that high fatty food and salt is bad for cardiovascular disease. What if I told you that there is much more to it than that? Sugar is made up of glucose and fructose joined together. The sugar destroys are good bacteria in the gut while the fructose component has the potential of causing Non Alcoholic Fatty liver disease. More will be discussed in sections on Glucose, Insulin Resistance and metabolic syndrome. There is a huge involvement of the microbiome here! The scope of this website is not to discuss the traditional aetiological factors causing disease or pathogenesis of disease (although some sections cover these areas in some detail). My focus will be on something that was never really taught to us at medical school. And yes you guessed that right, it is about microbiome. You will find yourself coming across this in almost every section!

By now you must be wondering what this microbiome is. The microbiome is an eco system in our gut, consisting of various microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi and even parastites) which live in harmony with us within our gut. There are trillions of these microbes in our gut. Some resources say over 30 trillion and others even quote 100 trillion! Now that is a lot of microbes. In fact there are more microbes in our body than our own cells! We are a symbiotic species that is meant to live in harmony with these microbes. They were there before humans arrived on earth and we were a perfect species for them to thrive because of our life spans. Our microbiome is so relevant to health and disease. This will be discussed in depth in the micrombiome section. 

Apart from discussing gut health and the microbiome, I will be discussing conditions such as fibromyalgia, endometriosis and Inflmmatory Bowel Sydrome (IBS). Why? Because these conditions effect many patients including myself, yet we do not understand the true aetiology of these conditions. Furthermore the management seems to vary amongst doctors, depending on their experience of treating these conditions. Many years ago I did a project on the Microbiome and when I wrote up this project, I wondered if the Microbiome had any part to play in many of these conditions I was suffering with or my patients suffered with. The evidence today seems to point a lot at the disruption of our Microbiome! How do we fix the microbiome? The answer is to clean up the diet. After all Hippocrates said "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food". And he was so right!