Neural Therapy: Why Chronic Conditions Stop Responding | Dr. Ilana Gurevich

Dr. Ilana Gurevich is a naturopathic physician with a GI practice in Portland. She was diagnosed with Crohn's at 19, and a naturopath is what turned it around for her.

What Neural Therapy Actually Is

Procaine was the second anesthetic ever discovered. It is a poor one, out of your system in twenty minutes, and that is not why she uses it. She uses it because it has the right balance of sodium and potassium, so when it reaches a nerve bundle it switches it off and back on.

Her comparison is a computer. Everything is wrong with it, you shut it down, start it again, and it works. Procaine does that to whichever ganglion you are resetting.

Neural therapy sits outside mainstream practice and the clinical evidence base is thin, which Dr. Gurevich is open about. Her own instruction is that you need a gastroenterologist alongside her.

Why Chronic Is the Word That Matters

Your nervous system should run as one continuous loop, spine to organ to skin and back. Surgery, chronic infection, injuries and scars can shut part of it down, and that is where dysfunction begins. She calls it worse than a speed bump, more like a seven mile backup.

So the word to look for is chronic. Interstitial cystitis, fibromyalgia, chronic diarrhea, chronic abdominal pain. Scars carrying emotional charge are a particular blind spot. She also injects the belly button, because every tissue traces back to it.

There are shallow skin injections, deeper ganglion injections, and a procaine IV that resets the whole system. She has an insomnia patient who had not slept more than two hours in years, and can get her a full night after an IV.

Ozone, and What She Has Seen

Ozone is oxygen with an extra atom. Her description is a husband and wife as O2, then you electrocute it and about thirty percent reforms as a husband, a wife and a girlfriend. Unstable, and back to oxygen within half an hour.

It does three things at once. It is antimicrobial, particularly against anaerobes, which by nature dislike oxygen. It finds damaged inflamed cells and irritates them further, so the body extrudes them. And it reaches the mitochondria and stimulates regrowth, so at 72 hours the tissue has been replaced.

Her strongest story is a patient's father with Wagner's disease, an autoimmune inflammation of the capillaries, who went from healthy limbs to necrosis in three days and was hospitalized facing amputation. They had no tools for it. He bagged each limb with ozone for fifteen minutes twice a day, and within three weeks the necrosis was coming away with healthy tissue underneath.

The Elemental Diet

A liquid only diet where nutrition absorbs high in the small intestine, giving complete digestive rest. She says it is well studied for IBD, could be curative for Crohn's, and that at four weeks it is equal to steroids in effectiveness, without the physiological cost steroids carry.

She is equally blunt about what it takes. She calls it borderline torture and does not prescribe it lightly. An overly sweet milkshake, and calling it a milkshake is a compliment she does not think it deserves. Fine on day one, unbearable by day fourteen, and sometimes it takes more than one round.

When the IBD Is Actually IBS

This is the part she says nobody talks about. People with inflammatory bowel disease often carry an IBS component alongside it. Their IBD can be in histological remission and they still have pain, gas, diarrhea and constipation, from the IBS inside the IBD.

What happens then is that every appointment assumes the IBD. Change the biologic, raise the dose, shorten the interval. She is not against biologics, and says if one manages your disease without side effects, take it. She puts the data at around 32 percent effective on their own, which is why the rest of the picture matters.

Enzymes, Fiber and the Pancreas

Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency is where the pancreas does not produce enough digestive enzymes to cover a meal, and diarrhea follows. Her point is that this comes back to nerve supply, which is where procaine returns to the story.

Pharmaceutical enzymes are animal derived and contain lipase, amylase and protease. Vegetarian ones are more likely to include cellulases, which humans do not make. So when fiber gives trouble, it may be a cellulase issue rather than the fiber.

Choosing Someone to Work With

On hemorrhoids she reaches first for a clinical procedure, a Keesey treatment, where a low volt galvanic current is applied through an anoscope and reverses the hemorrhoid without surgery. Where that is unavailable she uses horse chestnut orally and compounded suppositories with St John's Wort, butcher's broom, witch hazel and calendula.

On practitioners she is direct. You need a gastroenterologist as well. Her training asks what the cutting edge alternative is, theirs asks what the new pharmaceutical is, and neither replaces the other. Being annoyed at your doctor for not knowing a herb makes no sense, because that is not the medicine they practise.

Having the equipment is not the same as being good. Ask how they were trained, and how you should expect to feel afterwards. If they give you the heebie-jeebies, go elsewhere. Not every doctor suits every patient.