THE ANGRY GUT

Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP

Interventional pain physician, St. Louis. He is writing this book, and he wrote the two before it.

Treat the terrain, not the symptom

His clinical work runs on one principle. Most chronic disease he sees is downstream of metabolic, structural and inflammatory failures that are measurable and modifiable, and the symptom that brings someone through the door is rarely the thing that needs correcting.

The pattern came from the clinic rather than from the literature. The same insulin, the same unfinished inflammation and the same nutrient shortfalls that keep a back from healing are the ones that set how loudly a nerve fires, and how well a brain ages. Each book follows that observation into a different part of the body.

What he sees in his own patients

In the general adult population, fewer than 12.2% were metabolically healthy by NHANES 2009–2016 criteria (Araujo, Cai and Stevens, 2018). Under tighter cardiometabolic criteria through 2017–2018, that figure had fallen to under 7% (O’Hearn and colleagues, 2022). A halving inside a decade is the part worth sitting with.

Inside the practice the numbers are narrower still: fewer than 3% of patients overall are metabolically healthy, and fewer than 1% of chronic pain patients are. Those are practice-reported figures from our own population, not trial outcomes, and individual results vary. They are also why these books treat metabolic dysfunction as the default condition to be excluded rather than an unusual finding to be hunted for.

Board certifications

Dr. Padda holds five American board certifications:

  • Obesity Medicine — American Board of Obesity Medicine
  • Addiction Medicine — American Board of Addiction Medicine
  • Interventional Pain — American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians (ABIPP)
  • Pain Medicine — American Board of Pain Medicine
  • Anesthesiology — American Board of Anesthesiology

He is also a Fellow of Interventional Pain Physicians (FIPP), a Diplomate of the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners, a Certified Physician Executive, an advisor to the Nutrition Network, and practices at a Low Carb USA certified clinic.

Procedures are a bridge

He performs injections and ablations, and he is direct about what they are for. An injection or an ablation is symptom control now that buys the time and the mobility to repair the terrain. It is a bridge, not the whole plan — and what he avoids is the destructive operation that burns the bridge behind it.

The books

The Starved Brain — cognitive decline as a terrain failure. Ten chapters, one technical supplement each.

The Pained Brain — chronic pain as a systemic metabolic collapse. Twenty-two chapters, 2,291 references across its supplements.

The Angry Gut — in progress. Nothing published yet.

Educational material. Not medical advice. If you are in the St. Louis area and want this looked at properly, that is what the Padda Institute is for.