Transcript of AE 1059 - Interview: How to Deal With Body Parasites & Getting Naturopath Consultations with Ross McGibbon

G'day, you mob. Pete here, from Aussie English. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, this is part two of my little series with my mate Ross McGibbon. Today we're going to be talking about how he spent about a year battling three different diseases or parasites. So, he had a yeast infection, I think he had a bacterial infection, and he also had issues with this crazy parasite that he'd been infected with.

And it's just been a really incredible story. I've been chatting to him whilst he's been going through this, and I thought, it'd be cool if you share this on the podcast mate, just so other people can learn about it, maybe they're suffering from this and don't realise yet. What did you do to overcome this? Everything like that.

Besides that, guys, I had Ross on recently in this three-part series because he's selling his fundraising calendar to raise money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the Global Snakebite Initiative. So, the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a service that flies into remote parts of Australia to help people who get in trouble if they break a leg or get bitten by a snake.

And the Global Snakebite Initiative is a non-profit charitable organisation working hard on many levels to ease the burden of snakebite around the world. So, they're trying to do their bit to reduce the deaths and injuries from snake bites in countries like India or different parts of Africa or Asia.

So, without any further ado, guys, let's get into today's episode. Oh, and don't forget to check out part one and part three when that comes out after this. Let's go. What happened with the gut issue that you had? This is- You were mentioning this, and you told me this story and I was like, man, you got to share this on the podcast. Because it's such an interesting story. So, do you want to lay that out and tell us the, yeah, what happened?

Yeah. So, I was going downhill for about 12 months health-wise, and I was...

Just riding down a hill.

Just going downhill, mate. Just dropping levels, you know. And I'm a very motivated, energetic, personable guy. But my energy levels were just crashing until I physically noticed something was wrong. I needed, you know, hour nana naps every afternoon just to function. You know, lots of fighting with my partner at the time, and she was going through a heap of stuff and...

Sounds like you had kids.

Yeah, basically got a- Might have got a test of what it's like to...

Just nothing to show for it.

Yeah, nothing to show for it, just bad health. And that was happening over about 12 months and, you know, I tried to go away on a holiday with her and do some photography, and I was just exhausted, like giving up at eight o'clock and nine o'clock at night to go to bed and stuff and or just really struggling through it.

And I just noticed something was wrong and I went to a naturopath, described my symptoms, and they basically said it sounds like you've got some gut health issues. And one thing that she straight away picked out was brain fog...

Yeah.

...And that's where you're just really foggy, you can't absorb information, and you can't think straight. And it's actually to do with gut health...

It's that feeling right of almost like you haven't eaten in a day or two. The average person may encounter that kind of brain fog, but it's usually when they haven't eaten for a long enough period that they're sort of like, ugh.

Like that, but even more severe, like if you are- If we were doing any training at work at the fire station, I would be looking at whoever's training us and looking up at the board, and you just didn't even have the mental capacity to take any of it in or even read that well.

Like if you read a passage, you would be not absorbing it and retaining it. So, it's just like your eyes were reading the words and you weren't actually absorbing it. So, this is a real problem for me over 12 months and then obviously went to the naturopath, got a gut biome test done where it's a stool test.

It's not the most fun test to get done, but, you know, you do a stool test, you send that sample away and they do a full analysis of your gut, and they test your good bacteria, your bad bacteria. Then they test for yeast infections because you can get all kinds of different yeast infections in the stomach and then you can get parasites.

And when they got the results back, my naturopath was like, holy hell, I know people that have one of these problems and you've got three. So, I had an overgrowth of bad bacteria, a parasite and a yeast infection.

Jesus.

So, that's what was sending me downhill, and it was affecting everything. My quality of life was going right down and to the point where I wasn't even motivated to get my content out because I didn't have any creativity.

Yeah.

So, that's why you haven't seen a lot of video content from me over probably the last year and a half. But it's been a year long journey, and I've finally, I believe, gotten rid of it. I've got a retest in about three weeks, but I did a 10-day course of antibiotics just recently, which is kind of the last resort I did. And...

Did you have to change your diet up to try and adjust to that? Because that's the thing that I always freak out about when people are like, oh, just have some antibiotics. I'm like, you're literally, well, not literally, but you're taking like a nuclear bomb to your gut biome, right. All of the goodies and the baddies that live inside your gut and effectively, you're having to replenish it.

So, it's almost like you go through the Amazon rainforest and just slash and burn everything and then let it regrow. And if you just do that randomly without thinking about, you know, what fertiliser are we going to use? What plants are we going to encourage to grow? What animals are we going to reintroduce? Usually, the bad stuff takes back over, right, if you're just eating garbage food.

And so, you have to worry about high fibre, you know, prebiotics, probiotics, everything like that. And it's just something you want to obviously avoid if you can. They try and- A few times my son's gotten sick and they're just like, oh, just give him some antibiotics.

And I'm like, mate, you're a doctor. Surely, you know better than that. If he doesn't look like he's got a bacterial infection, that's like going to kill him, you know, he can probably survive without the antibiotics.

Yeah, it's they are given out way too liberally, and people do not know that what they do to your gut health. And the other thing people don't know is that your serotonin and I think even dopamine, definitely serotonin gets made in your gut. So, when you start having poor diet and especially problems like this, like the yeast infections and the parasite, when you sort of start any stressors that happen in your life...

Yeah.

...Like there could be a death of a family member or, you know, it can make you pretty imbalanced. And if your gut biome is out of whack, you can start to get depressed and anxious. So, depression and anxiety is being linked now to gut health.

Yeah, I think they've decided or discovered that there's a lot more to do with just an unhealthy diet. That's the reason that we have such high levels of depression today than, say, 50-100 years ago.

Yeah.

So, how do they think you got these the bacteria imbalance, the yeast as well, that seems freaky and the parasite? Each of those must have a completely different story of how you sort of ended up with it, right?

Well, the- They thrive, they're kind of symbiotic, so I had something...

Oh, okay.

...I had a yeast infection called Geotrichum. And it was- It's very similar to Candida, and Candida is the big one that a lot of people have, like...

Yeah.

...I can't remember the stats, but it's like one in five people or something like that. Candida, it's really bad. People get really all these different kinds of issues gut problems, brain fog.

Candida fungal infection caused by yeast, a type of fungus. Some species of Candida can cause infection in people. The most common Candida is, yeah, and it's yeah on the skin, inside the body, in places such as the mouth, throat, gut, vagina without causing any problems. So, it's obviously one of these bacteria, right, that, well, yeast and bacteria that are everywhere all the time.

But the problem is when they get out of whack and for whatever reason, they've gotten a foothold in your body and just take over.

So, high sugar diets...

Yeah.

...High starch. So, if you're eating lots of junk food, lots of sugar, lots of starches. And alcohol is the other one that's toxic to your gut biome, so if you're drinking every day, that's a recipe for, you know, depression, anxiety and just general un-healthiness. Like, I love a drink, but I try and limit it to just social events where I really enjoy it. But drinking every day apparently, that's what the naturopath was saying.

Drinking every day just kills your gut biome. So, if you're one of these old blokes that likes to knock off and have three or four beers of a night time, you're not giving your gut biome the chance to actually thrive. Basically, you've... They describe it like a garden...

Yeah.

...And you're letting weeds over grow, and obviously imbalances are all sort of happening in your gut. So, sugar bad one, gluten bad one, starch. So, all your potato like chips and stuff like that.

All the best stuff.

All the starchy stuff, you know. So, all that for me had to go and I- What I tried, I didn't tell you, I did three natural cleanses before doing the antibiotics. So, over 12 months, it took me to get rid of this parasite, and hopefully it's gone. I feel like it's gone. But I had to do all this work on my diet and yeah, no alcohol... ...Exclusion, so you exclude anything bad.

Did it take long to turn around when you did that, when you excluded those things? Or was it a pretty quick turnaround?

Well, the thing is, I got rid of the yeast infection and the bad bacteria, overgrowth. It was like a weed that shrunk then. But I didn't get rid of the parasite, and the parasite was what was really affecting me.

So, it was most of the issues, you know, was the bulk of it.

Yeah. So, then I had to basically go to the last resort, which is a big case of antibiotics, it's like three different types of antibiotics. And then a couple of probiotics and this other colostrum stuff that helps your gut while you're taking it, but.

So, what was the name of the parasite again? I know you told me in the past.

If anyone's interested in looking it up, it's called blastocystis hominis...

Blastocystis hominis.

...That's the scientific name, so.

So, how did they think you got this parasite, blastocystis hominis?

Yeah. So, it's apparently one in five people have it. So, it's picked up really easily through overseas travel, through contaminated food or water. And then also it's sort of passed through faeces from one organism to another. So, if you, you know, used a dodgy toilet over in Southeast Asia or, you know, you weren't able to wash your hands or anything like that.

And, you know, I've been to Bali heaps of times, I've travelled all through Southeast Asia for photography and reptiles and then been to the US and apparently, it's rife in the US. And all these people were just going downhill health-wise, and they don't know why. And if they go to their doctor the doctor has very limited scope to pick this stuff up, whereas...

Well, the symptoms must be so broad, right, that it must be so difficult without all of these analyses and tests and everything to work out what it actually is. Like, you almost have to do genomic tests where you get the- You look for the actual DNA of this parasite and then you're like, well, I guess that's it. As opposed to what are your symptoms, you know?

Well, the problem is the diagnosis, if you go to your general GP about this stuff, unless they're following gut health research and they're getting into those alternate therapies and they're happy to, like, send you to a naturopath or something.

But the current model for the health system is basically you go in, you see a doctor for 10 minutes, you describe your symptoms and then he writes you out a script, which is just a Band-Aid for the symptom. And that's how it works, just churning people through the health system and giving them drugs that they probably don't need.

And because I went to a naturopath, the naturopath are the ones that are starting to really clue on to gut health and how important it is. And then the medical doctors are kind of like slow to recognise it. But if you go to your GP, they're going to do blood tests on you, you know, they'll be like, you know, they'll just probably put a Band-Aid on the symptom unless they really know about gut health.

Have you seen that recent show that came out by Michael Mosley? So, he's, I think, a doctor from the UK, but this was on SBS. I watched this the other day; I think two episodes are out so far. Australia's health revolution with Dr Michael Mosley, and he's effectively gone around talking about diabetes, type two diabetes and showing that it's reversible, you know...

Yeah.

...It's much more linked in with your diet and, you know, lifestyle than you just end up with type two diabetes and you're stuck with it for life. And so, he's- The show kind of goes through him giving it to himself because he's already been susceptible to it and he's had to change his diet previously in his life.

And then he effectively just has a sort of normal Australian diet for two weeks and then gets pushed into pre- Type two diabetes range. And he's just like, shit. That didn't take long at all. And then reverses it just by cleaning his diet up. And so, he's helping these indigenous people and everything.

But it was just amazing because he talks to a bunch of politicians and doctors and people behind the diabetes website, you know, with advice from Australia. And a lot of those sites and everything, were just like, yeah, this is a condition that will not change. It's a progressive condition that needs to be treated with, you know, medication and we don't know why it's caused. And he's just like bullshit...

Yeah.

...That's bullshit. You know, like we do know why, it's too much fat around your pancreas, too much fat inside of your belly, you know, as opposed to under your skin and just an unhealthy lifestyle, which effectively underpins that. And once you take that into account within a few years, you can regenerate your pancreatic health and your liver health and everything like that and get back to normal. And so...

Yeah, there is definitely a problem with the current health model. Without going too into it there's a great book by Chris Kresser...

Yeah.

...And it's called Unconventional Health.

I think you sent this to me recently. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good book on basically how screwed our health model is. And, you know, as I described, you go in for symptoms, they put a Band-Aid on it and they give you drugs, and that's pretty much it.

Well, and that's the problem of having the pharmaceutical companies so well off and their incentives in all the wrong places, right. This is why cannabis is illegal. When cannabis has so many good uses with not even just, you know, in terms of drug use with getting high or anything like that.

But I think it has like 460 compounds in it that can be used for all sorts of things, you know, CBD is a really big one for, you know, can treat epilepsy, all this sort of stuff. But there's no money in it because the drug company can't- They can't patent it and say no one else can do this.

Anyone can just get some cannabis and grow it in their backyard and treat themselves effectively, so there's no incentive for the companies to be like, doctors, make sure you prescribe this. You know, we'll take you on a cruise and we'll give you all this money, just make sure that you send patients our way.

Yeah. If you want to see the way- Where our health system is going, just look at America.

Oh, it's horrifying.

Their stats with diabetes, and if you include diabetes type one and two and pre-diabetes, so basically, they're on the way to getting it...

Yeah.

...It's something like 80% of their population.

Yeah, it's insane in terms of just fast food, in conjunction with just that mentality of you treat illness with medication as opposed to lifestyle changes.

Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway, and this is something that I've really hammered home over the last year of journeying through, like I've lost 10 kilos, I've got all my energy back, I'm thriving now. And if you aren't thriving and your health is going downhill or you've got concerns, start with diet and lifestyle changes...

Yeah.

...And go and see a naturopath because they're the ones that are going to help you do that. Or even there's people- There's whole jobs now being created called a health coach.

Yeah.

So, they're not a naturopath, but say they're people like me who have maybe PT's where they are right into health and wellbeing, but they haven't gone to university and got the naturopath thing. So, there's health coaches popping up now which teach people to cut away stupid fad diets and fix their health themselves.

Because we're in this lazy, I don't know, this lazy mindset of like we need everyone else to fix us, so if we have a neck- We got a neck problem we go to a chiropractor and he goes, yeah, you need to come and see me three times a week for the next two months.

And he's just made two grand out of you on the spot, you know, and I know this from past experience because I've been seeing a chiropractor for over 10 years...

Yeah.

...And gone through it all myself. The problem is, stop looking for other people to fix you, you fix you.

And that's that thing, take on that responsibility. And I guess the thing that probably prevents a lot of people from doing it is just thinking they can't ever get access to the knowledge to help themselves do that.

It's everywhere, podcasts...

I think that's the biggest step, right? Just being interested personally in your own health and taking it upon yourself to at least try and educate yourself. You can always check in with GP's, with naturopaths, with whoever it is, friends, family and ask for their advice. But don't be afraid to get second opinions and then take everything on board and try and make an educated decision yourself, right, as opposed to just outsourcing it.

And it's the same with people learning languages. I remember, even when I was at school, when I was at school learning French and Chinese, I always thought I show up at class, the teacher teaches me, I learn the language. And it was only later in life when I started picking up French and Portuguese that I was like, no one's going to fucking help me, like, this is all on me.

I'm the one that has to do the hard work. I'm the one that has to go out of my way to do all this. A teacher is not going to teach me anything if I'm not there taking responsibility for what I'm learning. And so...

So, what changes from when you're at school? When you're at school, you just taught to pass the exam. You show up to class, the teacher teaches you, you don't- You're not really interested in the subject. You don't really care. They're not teaching you stuff like financial, like how to manage your money. They're not teaching you how to manage your health.

Or just how to learn, right. Logic 101 and how to learn, as oppos- They're much more inclined to just be like, we need our students to get past this exam and that's it.

Yeah, because we want them to go to university and we want them to go into this job.

Yeah.

But if you, you know, I have a completely different outlook to learning now as an adult than I did when I was younger. And I'm one of those people that I have a 40-minute drive to work, so it's either audio books or podcasts. That's over an hour and a half a day or nearly an hour and a half a day that I'm learning on the way to and from work.

Yeah.

Podcasts, audio books and then reading as well...

It's like investing money, right, except you're investing in your own knowledge and learning. You're just like, that's, you know, another hour and a half in the bank, another hour and a half in the bank, and it just slowly builds up like compound interest.

Yeah, but if you're not interested in your own health, generally, what you're going to get is chronic diseases or chronic health problems.

Well, you'd be pretty impressed, right, if someone who had no interest in their own personal health just happened to maintain a healthy lifestyle. You know, it's almost like that would be a total fluke.

Yeah. No, you've got to put the work in and like, honestly, it's so worth it. I've put the work in over the last year, and I've got myself back to thriving again. Like I remember listening to a podcast with Hugh Jackman on it, and he was just talking about the boundless energy he's got and his healthy routines and how he lives his life and what he achieves. And I was just like, man, I envy that guy and how much energy he has.

And then I sort of looked at how much I had and I'm like, why am I 10 years younger than this guy and I'm needing a nana nap to get through the day, you know? And that's what sort of got me on the path of like, okay, there's something wrong. How do I fix it? And then you've got rabbit holes to go down, like there is so much out there...

It's a strategy game, too, right? You have to treat it like you're playing a video game, except the video game's your life.

Pretty much, like no one else is going to teach you this stuff. Well, no one's going to come and be like, okay, mate, you know, like, here you go. You've got to chase it yourself. And like, I've got all this knowledge, I've got all these books, I've got all this stuff that I've learnt, and I can't push it onto anyone.

Yeah.

But occasionally I'll get a friend that goes, oh man, you've- I've got those symptoms, you know? And then I go, oh, go and see a naturopath. And literally one of my mate's girlfriends has the parasite that I have.

Jesus. She's been drinking your water, huh?

Yeah, but completely different threads of life. But she's travelled, she's, you know, gone here and there and done stuff, and she's got this parasite. And she was wondering why she was so tired and lethargic and brain fog and all this. And she had the same thing.

I reckon I'd go to the doctor and be like, I'm suffering from all this. Do I have a parasite? And they'd be like, yeah, you got kids.

You got kids. Yeah. But imagine, just imagine if you're in my situation where you're already not 100% and you then go and add kids to the mix...

Dear God, do not do that.

Now I wonder why people are depressed, unhappy, their relationships, like we're seeing all time relationship break ups.

Well, I think the US stats are like more marriages end now than stay together, right? You're just like what is even the point? Why?

That doesn't surprise me. They get married over there, just...

All right, so that's it for today's episode, guys. Thanks so much for joining me. Don't forget to go and grab yourself a copy of Ross's calendar. He's doing this as a fundraising event remember, trying to raise money to help people who get in trouble in Australia and need the Royal Flying Doctor service or people overseas who get bitten by snakes and need some help as well, whether it's treatment, anti-venom, all that sort of stuff.

So, you can go and get it from RMRPhotography.com.au, and remember, it's a bargain. It's just $35, and you're going to get 12 absolutely phenomenal photos from around the country in Australia of different animals. A lot of them really venomous snakes. So, anyway, guys, thanks again. Make sure to check out the other episodes in this series when they come out, and I'll see you next time.