Digestive Health Treatment in Greenville, SC
Digestive Health Treatment at IHP Greenville. Dr. Hendry, DAOM — functional medicine, root-cause diagnostics, personalized care. Call (864) 365-6156.
"Dr. Hendry has been working with me to heal my GI tract. 100% improvement in how I feel, taking 1/4 of my blood pressure meds, and am no longer taking cholesterol meds."
— Karen Hill · January 2025 · Google Review
When a new patient lists fatigue, brain fog, food reactions, joint aching, and irregular bowel habits as separate problems, I see one problem — the gut. The enteric nervous system communicates with the brain through the vagus nerve. The estrobolome drives estrogen recycling. Gut-associated lymphoid tissue houses 70% of the immune system. These are not abstract connections — they are the reason that digestive health treatment at IHP consistently improves conditions that seem unrelated to the gut until you understand how the gut drives everything else. Si Jun Zi Tang tonifies Spleen Qi. Targeted probiotics restore microbial diversity. Acupuncture at ST-25 and ST-36 normalizes vagal tone and GI motility. The approach addresses the whole ecosystem.
How Digestive Health Treatment Works
Digestive health treatment integrates acupuncture (for GI motility regulation, visceral pain, and gut-brain axis normalization), Chinese herbal medicine (Spleen and Stomach tonifying formulas based on pattern identification), and functional medicine (comprehensive stool analysis, food sensitivity testing, SIBO testing, and targeted supplementation). Dietary guidance — specific to your identified triggers and deficiencies — is central to the protocol.
Conditions Treated with Digestive Health Treatment
Gut Barrier Restoration vs. Long-Term Acid Suppression Without Mucosal Repair
Proton pump inhibitors and H2 blockers are appropriate acute interventions for mucosal erosion and Barrett's esophagus management. The clinical problem emerges when acid suppression becomes the sole ongoing strategy for a patient whose core pathology is gut barrier dysfunction. A 46-year-old man has been on pantoprazole for four years for GERD and was diagnosed with IBS six months ago. He reports increasing food sensitivities, joint aching after meals, and recurring urticaria without identifiable contact trigger. The sequence of events maps precisely to progressive intestinal permeability: GERD requiring acid suppression, reduced gastric bactericidal capacity from suppressed HCl, SIBO development, bacterial lipopolysaccharide-driven tight-junction disruption via zonulin upregulation, systemic passage of food antigens, and IgG-mediated immune reactivity presenting as joint inflammation and skin reactions. Our stool analysis confirms elevated calprotectin, undetectable pancreatic elastase, and SIBO-consistent hydrogen breath test. A structured repair protocol replaces digestive enzymes and HCl, eliminates identified antigenic triggers, re-inoculates with targeted probiotic strains, and repairs the epithelial barrier with L-glutamine and zinc carnosine. This sequence addresses the progressive dysfunction that acid suppression alone has not and cannot correct.
Research & Evidence
Gut restoration requires addressing four interdependent processes: mucosal barrier repair, microbial rebalancing, digestive enzyme sufficiency, and elimination of antigenic triggers that perpetuate epithelial inflammation. Fasano (Clin Rev Allergy Immunol. 2012) established that zonulin, the primary physiological regulator of intestinal tight junctions, is upregulated by gliadin exposure and dysbiosis, creating a measurable and reversible mechanism of increased intestinal permeability that precedes systemic immune activation. Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg (Cell Metab. 2014) demonstrated that dietary fiber deprivation reduces microbial diversity within days, and that reintroduction of fermentable carbohydrates restores Bifidobacterium and Akkermansia populations that produce the short-chain fatty acids essential for colonocyte energy metabolism and tight-junction maintenance. Vojdani (Autoimmune Dis. 2014) documented that molecular mimicry between dietary peptides and human tissue proteins becomes clinically significant only when intestinal permeability allows those peptides systemic access, making barrier repair the prerequisite for halting autoimmune perpetuation. Digestive enzyme insufficiency, particularly low pancreatic elastase and insufficient HCl production, impairs protein digestion to peptide fragments that are more immunogenic than fully digested amino acids, sustaining the antigenic load driving mucosal inflammation. Our protocol sequences barrier repair, enzyme repletion, and microbial reseeding in a structured 5R framework: Remove, Replace, Re-inoculate, Repair, Rebalance.
Your First Appointment
Bring a 3–5 day food-symptom diary. Describe your entire digestive experience: appetite, bloating (when?), gas, bowel pattern, pain location, and any known food associations. Prior GI procedures and prior functional GI diagnoses are relevant.
Why Dr. Hendry for Digestive Health Treatment
Dr. Hendry's Chinese medicine training emphasized the primacy of Spleen and Stomach health — a perspective that aligns remarkably well with modern microbiome science and the gut-brain-immune axis model. His functional medicine expertise adds the laboratory investigation dimension.