So you’ve been diagnosed with Blastocystis. Surely this is the cause of your poor health. Surely you’ve found the answer. Surely you just need to KILL…THAT…BUG! Yet I’ve found a surprising percentage of my clients with chronic “blasto” to have a significant history of trauma and burn-out. When I think about it, my current estimate on that stat is roughly 100%. What is the link between trauma in the body and parasites? And how can we heal it?
Although our entire culture thinks every situation can be reduced to a victim and a perpetrator, when it comes to “blasto” and similar ‘slow’ microbial infections– it always takes two to tango. ALWAYS. It’s the germ and the host, the seed and the terrain, the organism and its environment.
We live and breathe and work and choose our diseases into being, both individually and collectively, and we must live and breathe and work and choose our way out of them. Perhaps you’ve been working too hard? Perhaps you’ve been drinking too much? Perhaps you’ve been on the couch too long? Perhaps you’re lonely and scared and hurt and bitter?
What is Blastocystis?
So let me give you a little research on blasto so you don’t just dismiss all this as woo before I come back to my trauma hypothesis. In contrast to the understanding of more commonly ‘acknowledged’ pathogens such as Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Entamoeba spp., the clinical significance of Blastocystis has been uncertain since its discovery more than 100 years ago. At present around 1:7 humans have it, making around a billion carriers world-wide.
Studies show that 50% of HEALTHY adults in highly industrialized countries have blasto, and 100% of healthy Senegalese children have it. As a 2016 paper in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology states: “Randomized controlled treatment studies serving to identify any role for Blastocystis in disease, including alleviation of symptoms upon parasite eradication, are practically nonexistent.”
Blasto doesn’t even look like a parasite according to microbiologists; it has no flagella, lectins, or rhoptries and phagocytosis doesn’t occur in its presence. Blastocystis infections are actually less common in patients with infectious diarrhea and in those with IBS or inflammatory bowel diseases.
One researcher thus states that “it might be speculated that the presence of Blastocystis parasites may be an indicator of intestinal and maybe even general health”. Neither is there any evidence that Blasto impedes nutritional status and absorption; even healthy day care children with asymptomatic Giardia infection “show no disadvantage and perhaps even an advantage in nutritional status and freedom from other illnesses”.
Yet I have certainly encountered a number of people with blasto who are clearly failing to thrive. There are also at least 17 different geno-types of blasto, but the truly interesting thing from a genetic perspective is this: blasto prefers lean individuals to overweight ones. This is something I can confirm from my clinical experience, with blasto preferring either vata-type constitutions from an Ayurvedic perspective, or those with current vata derangement.
Could Burn-out and trauma really be the difference between those thriving with plastic and not?
Over the years, I have to say that I have yet to encounter someone with chronic lymes or blasto who was truly thriving until some evil bacteria or tick came out of nowhere. I’ve certainly encountered a bunch of healthy folk who have had a tick-born disease that knocked them for six but then recovered, but the ones that have chronic infections like this always have a pulse that shows PTSD or long-term exhaustion.
The thing about stress and trauma and burn-out is that it effects everything. EVERYTHING.
The most obvious connection with ‘parasites’ like Blasto is that trauma switches you in to a fight-or-flight adrenal mode as your baseline operating system… and switches OFF the rest-and-digest branch of your nervous system. So your guts and your immune system are off at the mains. The analogy I give my clients to move them away from our culture’s ‘bacteria as terrorists’ mentality is of a pot plant:
When a gardener sees a plant with aphids or mold infections they immediately know that their plant isn’t thriving because it’s not in the right environment. It has too much sun, or to little sun, or its soil drains too much or too little – the point is, rather than just trying to squish aphids, the experienced gardener tries to change the environment so the pot plant can thrive.
This is what I do with my clients. I help them move the pot plant of their life and start to tend to their Soul like a loving gardener.
Regardless of what disease label you’ve woken up with today, if you can cease to approach your illness as a terrorist to be fought, and instead sit down in deep dialogue with it I sincerely believe that you will learn something truly important about yourself.
Often, our diseases aren’t even terrorists at all, but freedom fighters, attempting to liberate us from the tyranny of our worn-out and limited identity.
Seen like this, bacteria like Blasto are idealists and dreamers, they seek change, they yearn for a better life… they just want to be loved.
Love your disease sweet friend, wake up each morning and greet it respectfully like the Zen-Master it is, for it is the medicine you have been searching for.
This article is reprinted from the author’s page here and is used with permission.
Dr Jimi Wollumbin has spent the last 22 years in clinical practice and has had the opportunity to research some of the most respected traditional medical systems; these include the Chinese, Tibetan, Indian and Persian traditions. He has also been fortunate enough to work in a series of community health and international aid initiatives. For more info see: https://www.doctorjimi.com
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