At the Treasure Coast Community Acupuncture Clinic (TCCA) we not only use Chinese medicine to treat this chronic condition, but we can also tap into Dr. Frank Ervolino’s knowledge as a Naturopathic Physician to give our patients a more comprehensive treatment plan for psoriasis.
There is little communication from the medical community to people who have psoriasis as to the actual physiology of the disease.
This education of patients is crucial in their ability to make changes in their lifestyle that will improve their quality of life. Without this education psoriasis sufferers are subject to non-scientific ideas and well-intended folklore that just ends up taking them down a dead end clinically.
Psoriasis has eluded successful treatment primarily because the medical and pharmaceutical community are obsessed with finding one cause and a remedy to correct that one cause. Psoriasis is a multi-factorial disease condition that has several contributors, but can be successfully controlled with some personal motivation.
In my clinical experience psoriasis starts in the small intestine. The small intestine has relatively small numbers of bacteria in it compared to the large intestine but there are situations where the small intestine can have large numbers of bacteria in it and this is called SIBO or small intestinal bacteria overgrowth. The reasons for SIBO are complex but too little stomach acid can be a big cause of this. So can decreased bile. If the digestive system is not working properly on a chronic basis due to genetics,stress or both then bacteria and fungi can migrate up into the small intestine. It is the livers job to remove hormones, toxic substances and cancerous compounds from the body and when this happens the liver gets overloaded with toxins it must remove from the body. If the liver cannot handle all the toxins they end up in the blood and in psoriasis there are an abundance of endotoxins in the skin that cause an autoimmune reaction where the white blood cells of the body start releasing inflammatory compounds on an ongoing basis which eventually causes actual (histologic) changes in the skin. The 2 systems that are compromised in the liver when psoriasis occurs are the p450 enzyme system which breaks down hormones and cancerous substances and the Macrophages which are part of the white blood cell system and are scavengers who can clean up almost anything that should not be in the body. The main cause of all this toxic activity in the liver are an impaired large and small intestine in the body. When they are subjected to damage caused by SIBO they allow larger proteins and more undesirable compounds to pass their protective wall and enter the blood stream where they eventually find their way to the liver. They also inhibit an enzyme called bacterial decarboxylase which converts amino into useful polyamines. They do this by simply over producing amino acids and exhausting the supply of this enzyme. This results in an inability to produce certain compounds useful to maintain health and an excess of other amino acids and compounds which can cause health problems.
The solution to a problem like psoriasis is complex and involves healing the gut by reducing the intake of foods which cause stress on the system such as wheat gluten which is insidious in our diet by being present in things we would not even suspect like licorice candy and eating foods which are not popular in diets today but can reduce harmful bacterial populations in the gut while promoting beneficial gut bacteria. Foods like leafy green vegetables and aromatic spice plants such as basil and ginger come to mind. A good dietary approach would be to do a strict elimination diet which reduces the number of actual foods you eat and allows you to reintroduce foods at a set rate. Along with this I would suggest a gluten free diet just to eliminate this common antigen in our diet. I would also use herbal compounds that are bitter because the bitter components of our diet can control negative bacterial populations in our gut and encourage healthy bacteria to populate our gut. Herbs such as Oregon grape root and goldenseal are excellent choices of bitter herbs to help the gut. The old Swedish Bitters formula is also very helpful to take every day. You can get these in a health food store or online. I am not a big fan of probiotic supplements because there are many more bacteria in our gut than we can grow in a lab so to say we are deficient in a few bacteria and that supplementation will solve our problems is too big a leap for me. There is one bacteria that does a good job healing the damaged intestinal wall though and that is Bifidobacterium. That is one bacterial supplement I would recommend using. For herbal compounds that would also heal the tissues of the gut I would use chamomile and fennel which have been known to heal the gut for centuries. Now this kind of therapy will take a long time to take effect and the results will vary from person to person but they should improve your overall health and help avoid other comorbid illnesses that accompany psoriasis like arthritis and heart disease.Acupuncture does a good job of improving your digestion, reducing your stress and improving your willpower to pursue such an undertaking.The ability of acupuncture to help the gut health is often vastly underestimated and the results can be seen very quickly. One has to be committed and motivated to improve their life and as a doctor I am often surprised at how many people just think it is not worth the effort and will live with this condition for their whole life hoping a single drug will come out that can control it. A drug which may also be toxic and cause its own serious health problems.
As a postscript to this article – My patients pointed out to me that I failed to mention a supplement that I had formulated for gut health that incorporates much of what I mentioned in the blog post above. It is called Digestsolve 24/7 and it is made by American BioSciences and available in health food stores. It has bifidobacteria, very special digestive enzymes and chamomile and fennel in it.
