Dr. Tabatha Barber (speaker) reflects on her surgical experience and how studying functional medicine changed her view: rather than endometriosis invading the bowel and causing scarring, she suggests gut inflammation may seep through the intestines to pelvic organs and drive pelvic organ inflammation and disease. The clip frames gut health as a potential driver of pelvic pain and endometriosis-related scarring.
Once I started studying functional medicine and they started talking about gut health and how it impacted all the other systems in the body, I was starting to think back as my time as a surgeon and how I would spend hours dissecting the bowels off of the ovaries and the tubes and the uterus and the bladder, and there was so much scarring. And we always thought that the endometriosis was, like, invading the guts and the bowels and causing all of this damage. But what I realized was it was the other way around. There was inflammation happening in the gut, and it was seeping through the intestines out into the pelvic organs. And so the gut was driving that inflammation that was angering the pelvic organs and contributing to this disease process.
