About Us
Hello, my name is Will and I am the founder of Intestinal Fortitude. I woke up one morning back in 2012 sick as a dog. Based on the symptoms, and the all-you-can-eat Crab Leg dinner from the night before, I thought I had food poisoning. Unfortunately, the symptoms persisted for weeks. A trip to the doctor and a short round of antibiotics got me feeling better for a few days, but then it started again. Another trip to the same doctor and a longer round of antibiotics really did the trick... for a few days.
At this point I was referred to a Gastrointestinal (GI) specialist who listened to my plight and promptly informed me that I most likely had Ulcerative Colitis (UC). WTF? I swallowed a pill-cam and wore a "sweet" fanny pack contraption to work the next day. The results? Inconclusive! So, I signed up for my first ever colonoscopy. The results? I didn't have UC, I had Crohn's disease. Double WTF? The GI doc put me on Prednisone and sulfasalazine, and began to lay out my options for long-term medication. Mind you, I'm in my mid-30's at this point and am not excited about 60+ years of drugs. So, I politely declined and set about researching alternative methods with which to deal with this disease.
I read every blog, joined every IBD related facebook group I could find, Googled every term I could think of. If someone mentioned what had helped them, I wrote it down. Then I went back to Google and looked to see if there were any scientific studies behind these ingredients. I bought and tried dozens of individual supplements. There were so many bottles on my bathroom sink that there was barely room for my toothbrush. Hundreds of hours of research and self-experimentation brought me to the "blend" that has given me several years of almost symptom-free living.
The more I searched and the more I learned, the more I grew concerned with the quality and trustworthiness of the supplements on the market. I knew I'd potentially be taking these for the rest of my life, and I could already see how expensive that was going to be. I knew that the only way that I could keep the quality up and the price down was to start my own company.
I teamed up with a Doctor of Pharmacology to “tweak” my blends for professional manufacturing. I searched for and interviewed many different potential manufacturing partners. (Some of these conversations let me know that I was 100% right to be concerned about the supplement industry). And then AI-5, GLR-6, and PRO-B11 were born! Like a spark of Divine light, the name Intestinal Fortitude just popped into my head and so it began... now you get to benefit from that fateful decision.