Adaya Gonzalez |
Madrid (EFE).- Elena no longer feels like a “weirdo” when she says she has SIBO because everyone talks about it, but the road up to here has been hard: after a very restrictive diet she is 10 kilos less, and also many euros less in your pocket. “Aid would be necessary,” she claims.
Associating his symptoms with an intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) would have been impossible without a professional expert in microbiota, which “mostly are in private healthcare because the public does not treat you or send you the tests and he diagnoses it as irritable bowel, depression or fibromyalgia without delving into the base”, this 53-year-old patient denounced to EFE.
She began with a different symptomatology than the one that is usually more common: “In principle they were not the typical digestive. I started with exaggerated allergic reactions, the first to an insect bite last summer, later to a wasp sting, then to a dewormer for the dog…”, she recounts.
Which led him to consult an allergist who, “intrigued by the results of the tests that showed very high histamine and a deficiency of the enzyme Diamine Oxidase (DAO)”, sent him some tests.
“I was lucky because this doctor knew the subject well and upon confirming some more symptoms, she became alert and identified it more or less soon”, so that treatment could begin last February.
First it was a diet low in histamine, in May he added a treatment of two specific antibiotics -rifaximin and metronidazole combined for 14 days-, and then three months of herbaceous indicated for intestinal dysbiosis.
So the diet was already FODMAP (from the acronym in English Fermentable, Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Low Polyols, that is, low in fermentable carbohydrates). As she was also fructose intolerant, her diet was severely limited.
“Hard ride”
“It has been a tough journey, since it is a long-term diet and between one test and another in the end I spent six months with many dietary restrictions, which is why I have lost about 10 kilos,” he explains.
In addition, in this time she has felt “quite lost”. “When I started, you didn’t hear that much and it was a strange and rare thing, now all the media have talked about it and they no longer look at you as a weirdo,” she celebrates.
After half a year of diet and treatment, he has to rest for a month and repeat the tests in September. Little by little she has been introducing some foods and “it seems” that she is accepting them, although she has “some headaches” and constipation, from which she is also improving.
But along the way, an important part of money has also been left.
High prices of nutritional supplements
“Antibiotics are the least of it: food supplements to counteract deficiencies in the diet have high prices”, without forgetting visits to a nutritionist specializing in microbiota and intestinal dysbiosis.
Thus, he calculates about 1,000 euros in supplements, plus an enzyme that he will have to take all his life and that costs him 50 euros a month.
“In addition to the lack of assistance in public health, financial help would be necessary not only to pay for supplements and nutritionist consultations”, because on top of that the food that people like her can eat “must generally be organic, fresh, of proximity and proximity, biological, without additives. And that raises the shopping basket enormously, ”he concludes.
