"Leaky Gut"

Where to start?  Well, I've been feeling increasingly crappy these days, sleeping poorly, forgetting important things (like names of actors).  Coincidentally, a few months ago, the doctor we've had for years and years announced a drastic change in her practice.  She was switching to "functional medicine".  This essentially means that she wanted to treat patients as a whole rather than as a set of symptoms, and she wanted to get out of the pill-pushing game (particularly as she'd seen a couple of patients overdose on opioids).  We were very much on board with this, even when we discovered that it begins with a trio of tests (on spit, piss and shit, to put it bluntly) that are NOT CHEAP and not covered by insurance (unlike opioids and Viagra).  So we both did the tests (a HORRIFYING ordeal.  Well, not the piss and spit ones) and went in to have them explained.  Jami did this a while back (and can explain in her own post) but I just got mine explained to me a week ago - at the same time that our doctor announced that she was LEAVING HER PRACTICE ALTOGETHER!  Not what you want to hear when you've done the expensive beginning part of what you thought was going to be a long journey together.  Turns out that the majority of her patients were PERFECTLY happy with the whole pill-pushing thing and jumped ship in horror at this new idea, and we were among the select few that embraced it.  This meant that, what with paying for malpractice insurance and renting rooms at the joint practice she's at, she was left with nothing at the end of the day.  So her future is up in the air - she says she can make money doing on-call urgent care, something she got good at doing her internship in the bad-old-days Detroit.  Eventually she will set up for herself, but at the moment she's about to leave us hanging.  She is aware of this and is trying to get us set up to be independent.  Anyway, the title of this post comes from what condition she divined I had from the state of my stools.  I understand that this is a controversial notion (read: some people lump it in with anti-vax-level nonsense) but all I can say is she had some very scientific looking charts that revealed that my gastro-intestinal tract was not doing its job, in a way (she claimed) that would explain various crappiness, including my arthritic toe (which did seem to get better when I switched to a gluten-free diet a while back) and my sleeplessness.  So I'm willing to give this a shot.  "This" includes a pretty drastic diet (at least for a few months until my "gut is healed") involving a lot of (gulp) "bone broth". (Jami, in typical fashion, and just like Granny, has enthusiastically plunged into research, part of which involved the purchase of those books.) It also involves a ton of pills which ALSO are not covered by insurance (you're looking at over $300 worth in that picture).  So we'll see what happens.  I'm enjoying the copious amounts of kim chee and saurkraut, even if I'm not used to having them for breakfast...  (I will also report that my energy level has already gone up, after less than a week of the diet, and my toe is feeling as good as it has in years, so I'm on board... for now.)