Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Klein.
Hi Scott, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Playing hockey was one of my favorite things as a kid. My first year of travel hockey, I was scoring two goals a game. I was basically the star of my peewee team.
Then Crohn’s disease struck while I was away at a hockey tournament…
At just 12 years old, already skinny as a rail, I lost 20 pounds, slept only 3 to 4 hours a night, threw up any food I ate, and had 20 bloody bowel movements a day.
What crushed me most was that I couldn’t even skate; I was simply too weak. That was the beginning of a very painful journey, one that left a mark on my soul.
The Creation of Adam frescoed by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel
Living With CD
I see a lot of blogs and Twitter posts about people with IBD who claim that cutting out sugar made their Crohn’s or UC disappear. That wasn’t me.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, made my Crohn’s better. By the time I was 13, I had tried every allopathic drug you can think of.
These weren’t mild meds. No, these were the ones you see on TV, listing all those wild side effects and how you could drop dead just taking them.
To top it off, I got a horrible case of C. diff, a deadly bacterial infection that lasted for years.
Daily life was terrible, not going to lie. The only relief from all the pain was when I was asleep.
I was taking the maximum allowed dose of painkillers per day, which wrecked my liver.
Going to the bathroom 10 to 20 times a day became normal. Throwing up became expected. It felt like I had swallowed razor blades for every meal.
I was bleeding every day and constantly anemic. I was extraordinarily weak and looked as if I hadn’t eaten in months, because honestly, I barely did.
If you’re not familiar with IBD, the worst cases are truly awful. Basically, your intestine attacks itself (I don’t know if I buy that theory), as if it were a virus or bacteria.
Your body tries to neutralize this “threat” and what results is an inflamed and bleeding digestive tract.
Think back to falling off your bike at age 10 and scraping your knees badly. Now imagine that same kind of mess happening inside your intestines, for years. I can’t explain just how severe the pain of a bad IBD flare really is.
You don’t live a normal life. Your whole day revolves around the bathroom and your bed. You can forget about hanging out or enjoying food, or doing anything normal.
The pain gets so bad your mental state starts to break down. All you think about is getting better.
It’s like a flesh eating bacteria took up residence in your gut, thats kinda how you can imagine Crohn’s.
When it wasn’t Crohn’s, I had blood clots that made normal life even harder. Walking made my left leg swell up like a balloon, and the needle marks from the twice-daily blood thinner shots covered my legs.
By the time I was 13, I was losing hair from the medication, and my face was swollen from all the steroids.
Kids in my school were brutal little a‑holes about that – shocker…
Life was honestly horrific. The only thing keeping me going was my faith and the idea of redemptive suffering.
Losing health means losing everything. You can’t understand this until you are desperate to survive.
You get tired of fighting, doing it all day, every day, and sooner or later you just burn out.
It’s like training for boxing: the first ten minutes are okay, but by the end, all you want is for it to be over; you’re ready to give up.
Pain and suffering teach lessons that nothing else can. Relating to people gets harder, because, as they say, the worst thing you’ve gone through is the worst thing you’ve gone through.
Final Straw
My second flare at around eighteen wasn’t much different from the first. Same pain level, lost 20 pounds, endless medications, you get the idea.
But this time really made me lose faith in allopathic medicine.
St. Augustine said, “It was pride that turned angels into demons.” Pride doesn’t belong anywhere in life, especially medicine.
Most practitioners haven’t suffered as their patients have. It’s rare to find a cancer doc who has had cancer, or a gastroenterologist with IBD.
At a fundamental level, they can’t truly relate. That isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just is what it is.
During the second flare, talk of cutting out my colon started. They never mentioned diet, sunlight, supplements, or environmental toxins; they never once covered possible causes.
Their hubris would not let them consider anything a ‘mere peasant’ without a medical degree might suggest.
When I was little, I loved McDonald’s. My mom asked if I could keep eating it, and the doctor said yes—twice! You can’t get much more basic than that.
A year later, I took matters into my own hands. I researched health, ate more meat, cut out seed oils, and saw a holistic doc. Still, I was on heavy duty medicine, running two immunosuppressants at once, dangerous stuff, but at least I was eating cleaner.
Eventually, I checked my progress with a colonoscopy because I wanted to see how things were moving.
How They Almost Killed Me
Neglect of basic health concepts had already done plenty of harm, but it was their carelessness that nearly killed me.
They let a student perform a colonoscopy despite knowing I had significant scar tissue within my colon. I wasn’t some case you just throw a student on and wish em luck.
I had years of serious scar tissue that had built up, and they knew this because it had caused trouble in prior colonoscopies!
Sure enough, she ripped a nice big hole in my colon.
That’s like letting a student mechanic work on a Ferrari. He can watch, but let him practice on a Honda Civic for goodness sake.
Colonoscopy wake ups are usually mellow thanks to the drugs; that was not my experience. I woke up screaming bloody murder.
Nobody had any idea what was wrong.
Why? Because the doctor couldn’t wait 15 minutes for me to wake naturally. She had other things to do, than to tend to someone who’s colon was just ruptured.
There’s no way to perforate someone’s colon without realizing it, like come on.
Between my dad and the nurses, no one could tell why I was screaming. After fifteen minutes, I was asked if I wanted to go to the hospital.
No chance, I hate hospitals after all the many bad experiences. So we went home.
Imagine getting stabbed in the stomach and deciding to just “sit this one out.” My pain tolerance is serious after years of this, but this time it was just stupid.
The car ride home was pretty bad, you can bet your ass I felt every single bump.
At home, I screamed in agony for three hours before finally throwing in the towel and heading to the hospital.
The Hospital
All my life, I tried to avoid losing my colon. I didn’t want to go through that. But that day, despite having actually been improving, it happened.
When the surgeons came in, I knew it was over.
“Yeah, there’s a massive hole in your colon. You’re lucky you came in today. We need to remove it because of your IBD.”
Uh what? I was shocked. I never expected to lose my colon that morning. How can you ever be ready for news like that?
A day later, I was alive—but without my colon. Had I stayed home that day, I probably would have been rushed to the hospital next morning with sepsis or internal bleeding, about to croak.
Waking up and seeing a stoma, my small intestine coming through my abdominal wall into a collection bag, was messed up.
The doctor even called while I sat in the ER before going to surgery, rest assured she got a mouthful.
Four years have passed, and it still feels unreal. Losing what I fought so hard to keep, only to get smacked in the face cause some negligent doctor.
The anger, despair, resentment—all hit me a week later. I felt so wronged, I was so, so angry.
Moral of the story
Do I wish I could have sued that doctor and her practice into oblivion? Absolutely. Do I think she should ever care for another patient? No chance.
Do I believe she deserves mercy? Yes.
As a Christian, I can put myself in her shoes and feel compassion for her choices.
Would you have acted differently? Would you have abandoned a patient out of fear? Maybe, maybe not.
But at the same time, there isn’t any place for this when people’s lives are at stake.
I am grateful despite all the suffering I have gone through. It truly has been the biggest blessing for my character development .
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Mostly smooth not really to many issues
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Got it. Here’s the tighter version, education-first, no clinical claims.
I’m a certified health coach helping Christians uncover the root cause behind autoimmune disease, gut dysfunction, and chronic illness. Find what was missed, so you stop losing your most valuable asset: time.
I came to this the hard way. At 12, Crohn’s struck: 20 lbs gone, 20 bloody bowel movements a day, a month in the hospital. In 2019 a resident perforated my colon. Sepsis nearly killed me and emergency surgery took the colon I’d fought to keep. Then hidradenitis suppurativa tore into my skin. That was the lowest point.
Ten years of that. Six biologics. Twenty rounds of antibiotics. Then $20,000 on supplements, every diet you can name, 40+ days of fasting, and multiple functional medicine doctors. Nothing stuck until I stopped chasing symptoms and went after what was actually driving them: environmental burden, gut dysfunction, dietary triggers, circadian biology.
What sets me apart is that I teach. I don’t hand people a protocol and send them off. Most of my clients have already been handed protocols. What they’ve never been given is the why. So we go through it together, step by step, until they understand their own body well enough to make decisions without me. Education beats protocols. If you don’t know the what and the why, what’s the point?
I’m most proud of the name. The Little Way comes from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: small things done with great love. Healing isn’t one heroic move. It’s small, faithful steps, done consistently. That’s the whole philosophy, and faith isn’t decoration on it, it’s the foundation.
I work with clients one-on-one in 4, 6, and 9-month programs, all built around private sessions, weekly check-ins, and a client dashboard with educational tools and resources. I also write the Biohacking Blog, where I break down the hidden triggers behind chronic illness in plain language.
This is educational coaching, not medical care. But if you’ve been told everything looks normal and you still feel terrible, something is driving it. I’ll help you learn how to find it.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Honestly, risk doesn’t scare me much. If you know how to run a business and you know how to market it, risk usually pays off. The people who get burned are the ones taking a swing without those two things in place.
And I’ve already been through worse than a failed business. When you’ve almost died, betting on yourself doesn’t feel that dangerous.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://littlewaycoach.com
- Twitter: https://x.com/biohackingdad
- Other: http://biohackingblog.net/
