We had a little Octoberfest party in the court in our neighborhood this past weekend. Everybody in the neighborhood brought a pot luck dish and we all sat around in a big circle chatting while the kids rode bikes and played basketball. Phil, my across the street neighbor, has one of those commercial snow cone makers which added a little special festive flare to the gathering.
This was a first time for the neighborhood Octoberfest. We have been doing a similar gathering for years for the fourth of July, but this year someone actually gathered emails from everyone and put this gathering together. It is a good opportunity to meet new neighbors and reconnect with the old ones.
To stay in the Octoberfest theme, I made a traditional German red cabbage dish and piled on some organic grass fed Kielbasa. Several other people had the same association between Octoberfest and sausage as a number of other types of sausages arrived. One neighbor really went all out and was deep frying schnitzel on site and had made up potato dumplings and gravy to go with it.
Because of my eating restrictions right now I avoided all the food except the red cabbage and a couple organic sausages. Ellen, however, wanted to try out some of the goodies – meaning the schnitzel, potato dumplings with gravy, and German potato salad. She said it was delicious.
The next morning Ellen woke up with back pain. She never has back pain. She had done nothing to cause any back pain. When I was awake enough to pester, she had me muscle test why her back was hurting. Nothing much showed up in her back, but her stomach and small intestine were all inflamed. This inflammation in turn caused the psoas muscles lying under the intestines to spasm and pinch her low back. The pain signals from the stomach and duodenum were referring directly to the mid back and causing the tiny muscles around the vertebra there to tighten up.
This process is called a viscero-somatic reflex. With this reflex, pain in your inner organs can cause pain in your muscles and bones. I see this all the time at the office. Ellen was not even aware that her intestines or stomach were sore until I pushed in on them. The same thing frequently happens with patients. My first clue to look for an active viscero-somatic reflex is when the patient says their back hurts for no reason at all. They didn’t do anything to cause this pain they are in. Back pain is not always because of something you have done to your back.
When I find an unhappy gut, I put the patient on a low residue diet – soft foods that don’t kick up inflammation. The gut lining can get really raw and anything scratchy, like nuts or raw veggies, can really bother it. But the real triggers you have to avoid are the foods that promote inflammation. With Ellen I tested each of the foods she had eaten. The worst offender was the oil the schnitzel was cooked in. Deep-frying in vegetable oil is always a bad choice. It produces massive inflammatory chemicals, both simply by virtue of the heating of the oil and the hot oil’s interaction with the food.
The second big offender was the gluten in the breading of the schnitzel and in the gravy. Gluten is highly gut inflammatory for everybody, but if your gut lining is healthy you can usually tolerate it as long as there is no immune issue with it.
In a healthy gut you have a thick coating of mucus full of antibodies that will attach to any gluten and inactivate it. If your stomach acid is working perfectly, the gluten will be broken down by the stomach acid and then destroyed the rest of the way by strong pancreatic enzymes. Well these things wear down over the years and are not as strong as they need to be to neutralize poisons like gluten and thousands of other nasty things we end up consuming – some by choice and others without ever knowing.
Gluten is particularly noxious because gluten is glue. It breaks through the gut lining and gets into the blood stream. From there it ends up gluing itself onto the outsides of various tissue cells. It seems particularly to like thyroid, brain, and pancreas cells. Unfortunately, when your immune system sees this glue on its cells, it goes crazy and starts attacking the cells like they were some sort of invading bacteria. The result is auto-immuine thyroiditis, or pancreatitis, or brain inflammation resulting in dementia or movement disorders like Parkinson’s. It can really end up gluing itself onto anything – it just depends on the person.
So the net result of this awareness is the understanding that with age comes a gradual decrease in your ability to eat the kinds of things you could eat when you were young. Most of you already know this based on the fact that antacid drugs are one of the best selling pharmaceuticals on the market. (Acid reflux is caused by not enough acid, not too much acid.) Well now you can add in the awareness that when your gut gets unhappy, it likes to refer that pain to your back.
So the next time your back hurts for no reason, or your back just won’t stabilize even though you are doing all the right things, consider that the real problem actually is starting in your gut. Gut pain can create back pain.