Welcome back.
Thanks for joining me back again in my helicobacter pylori series.
It's Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher and formulator
of the Canxida range of products.
We're going to do another video today called "What are the risk factors if H. pylori is
left untreated?"
The risk factors really depend on you.
It depends on how you're experiencing your infection.
Do you have a mild case?
Do you have a moderate case?
It depends a lot on your current diet and lifestyle.
Are you smoking tobacco?
Are you drinking alcohol all the time?
Are you eating crappy foods?
Are you eating a lot of takeaway food?
Are you living a high stress life?
Are you taking lots of medications?
Are you ignoring health in general and just living a life full of whatever, booze, and
I don't know what you do out there.
You get my point.
If you're a person who's living a healthy life, a person who's getting plenty of sleep,
a person's who's trying to eat a good healthy whole foods diet, a person who exercises regularly,
a person who understands that smoking is the most stupid thing you can do.
When you start living like that, the chances are you're going to overcome the infection
much faster than a person who's not living like that.
The risks will always increase with any kind of condition when a person doesn't take their
health seriously.
One of my favorite sayings has always been, "If you don't take your health seriously,
you should take it somewhere else."
And that's what I think all doctors should tell their patients.
If you don't give a damn about your health, then the doctor shouldn't give a damn about
you.
Then you're left to your own devices.
I could never understand why years ago, they had people in hospitals smoking tobacco, cigarettes,
and they'd actually wheel them out of the ward outside with the nurses so they could
smoke out there and then wheel them back in again.
I could never work that one out.
When you do habits that are known to be detrimental to your health and you've got no control over
those, then there is only one possible outcome for you and that's living a pretty crappy
life when you get a bit older.
And it's all your own doing.
But if you're not like that and you're like me, you try to take care of your health, then
the chances are the consequences aren't so grave when you have an infection.
Because there's a huge chance for you to overcome this infection in a shorter rather than longer
period of time.
Let's just say you're a healthy person with a helicobacter infection who's probably taking
a proton pump inhibitor, some kind of acid blocking drug or Pepto Bismol or something
on a regular basis, and millions of people in America are doing that right as we speak.
In Germany, in Holland, in England, in Singapore, many countries around the world, people are
doing it right as we speak.
They're taking a medication for their heartburn.
They don't pay any attention to the infection.
They think that they've got no helicobacter because their doctor said they're perfectly
fine, and they can't find any cause for the heartburn or inflammation, so they just put
them on a drug.
Well, the long term consequences for those people is not so good, unfortunately.
I think you can get away with these drugs when you're in your 30s and 40s and 50s.
But when you get a bit older, that's when your chickens come out to roost.
Why would that be?
And that's because your body is getting older.
Liver function declines.
Kidney function declines.
Immune function declines one to three percent per year.
Everything is slowly declining.
We're all going to die.
We know that, but all of us want to die slowly.
We don't want to die quickly.
Medications long term come at a huge cost to your health.
The point I want to make out of the video is if you do have a symptom, your consequences
are great if you keep taking a drug to suppress the symptom.
That's the problem.
If you take a drug short term and then get off it, I think it's okay.
Try to see drugs like credit cards.
Once you've used them, cut them up and dump them.
Flush them down the toilet.
Get rid of them.
Don't keep using it.
Would you keep racking up debt on a credit card and not paying it back?
You wouldn't do that, but that's what people do with medications all the time.
Don't be a mug and stay on a drug.
If you've got a symptom, find the cause and fix it.
That's the intelligent approach.
And people who start thinking like that have got a much greater chance of not having serious
consequences as they age than people who throw caution to the wind.
Keep drinking wine or whiskey.
Keep eating potato chips all the time.
Keep taking drugs.
Those are the people that end up with serious health problems down the track.
This is quite a serious video and I want you to think about it.
If you take medications long term or have got a partner who takes them long term or
a loved one or a friend or a family member in exactly this position, it's nice to be
able to urge that person to say, "Look, come on.
Check this out.
It's not good long term.
Let's get this problem sorted.
Maybe a bit of testing.
Let's try to clean up your act.
Clean up your diet."
Those are the intelligent approaches that are going to help that person to have a better
quality of life as they get older rather than misery, which a lot of people have.
When they get to my age, 50s or 60s, they end up with serious, serious digestive problems,
crippling pain, more drugs and more medication.
It's not really a nice way to grow up and to spend your last years in pain and misery.
To answer that question, "What are the risk factors if it's left untreated?"
Well, the risk factors, in my opinion, are slim if you're a healthy person who knows
how to look after his or her health.
But the risk factors are great if you remain on medication and you throw caution to the
wind and don't care about your diet and lifestyle, then you've got great risk factors.
Thanks for tuning in.
Catch up with me in the next video.
The next video, we're going to do "How do I prevent from getting H. pylori?"
Thank you.