From many years ago…

∞ I believe we will eventually discover that we were at least partly (yet severely) confused about locating problems such as addiction and mental illness in the brain. I include here problems such as ADHD, OCD, and others.

The gut is the original and present locus of feeling. Drugs affect our metabolism which directly and immediately impacts the vast bacterial populations of the gut dramatically and selectively. So do emotions, because they result in metabolic changes that the gut is intimately sensitive to in ways we have not yet discovered.

Drug addiction produces profound changes in the sense of one’s stomach and digestive system. Various states of panic, despair or anxiety are felt ‘in the gut’ not in the head. Emotions such as love and comfort are ‘gut feelings’. No aspect of us can be at ease when our guts feel tense, constricted, absent, pain, and so on.

Apparently markers for diseases like Alzheimers appear in the gut »before they are found in the brain.

A doctor I know effectively cured a teen that had long been diagnosed with severe ADHD by the administration of an antifungal drug. This was illegal, and I am not suggesting it was prudent or correct. The doctor in question was sued, fined, and so on. The problem was that he recognized the correlation between the symptoms in the teen and the metabolic results of fungal infection.

In the gut.