The brain-gut connection: how TCM has known for centuries what Western medicine is now discovering

Trusting your gut may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as medical science. Or does it?

Research increasingly shows that the connection between our “gut” and our brains – especially our emotions and mental health – is closer than has ever been imagined. In recent headlines and medical research papers, doctors and researchers are employing a new term for the gut: the second brain.

Research such as that from doctors Braden Kuo and Allan Goldstein at Massachusetts General Hospital, the US, who found that bacteria in the gut can affect mood, cognition and behaviour is increasingly exciting to fellow doctors and scientists.

But practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can be left exasperated. They say that Chinese medicine has understood the connection between the gut and the body’s overall health for thousands of years.

“When I see patients, the first thing I do is to assess their gut health,” says Ronald Hubbs, a licensed acupuncturist and professional herbalist in Portland in the US state of Oregon. And while recent research into the mind-gut connection is getting press, Hubbs says that “the vast majority of mainstream Western doctors and health-care practitioners are still treating the mind as something separate from the rest of the body. And many patients are continuing to suffer.”