Inflammatory Bowel Confusion

There are a lot of questions concerning inflammatory bowel conditions. I don’t blame you if you are scared to death after leaving your doctor’s office. Lot’s of mumbo-jumbo. It is often true that if you go to 2-3 doctors that you will get 2-3 different opinions. It should not be so complicated!

Modern medical science wants to fragment everything out. They can’t see the forest for the trees. There are not an infinite number of inflammatory bowel conditions. There is only one and the rest of what we think are different are just a variation of it. They are all IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. In every case the colon is irritated. There can be a little or a lot of irritation. We don’t have to give it different names. A small amount of irritation brings about small symptoms. Big creates big. All of these are the same manmade conditions with just different amounts of damage to the bowel tissue. This is just like 1st-2nd-3rd degree burns.

It does not matter what part of the GI tract muscle is injured. It’s all the same. It’s one long muscle from your mouth to your rectum. What counts are the symptoms, our ‘body language.’ We need to become fluent in body language. It is speaking to us telling us there is something wrong. It is screaming-diarrhea, gas, bloating, blood, mucus - help! All of these symptoms are just different ways for your GI tract to say ‘ouch.’

Don’t get hung up on whatever name they give you, whether it’s Colitis or Crohn’s. Remember they are all the same. A big boo-boo or small boo-boo. It is the same muscle tissue, the same cause and the same cure. Listen to your body.

Exploring the Train of Pain

You may not realize that the various inflammatory bowel conditions are actually related: Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Colitis, Ulcerative Colitis, and Crohn’s. Let’s take a minute and look at these conditions. From the point of view of a naturopathic practitioner each of these issues is really just a progressively worse version of the previous one.

With each of these conditions as time goes by without the proper treatment there is more and more damage being done to the tissue of the GI tract. You can compare this damage to that of first, second, and third degree burns. As the level of a burn gets higher not only is it more painful but also more complicated to treat.

I call this progression ‘the train of pain.’ Each GI issue can be considered a stop along the way. The symptoms accumulate at each ‘stop.’

The 1st stop is Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). The symptoms here include some pain that is more like cramping, gas, bloating, and diarrhea. These symptoms are barely tolerable and as the train runs down the track do nothing but get worse.

The next stop is Colitis. Now the symptoms of IBS have gotten more pronounced, especially the diarrhea which by now has become urgent and intolerable.

As we keep rumbling down the line the next stop is Ulcerative Colitis. Nobody likes this stop especially those who can’t stand the sight of blood—in their toilet bowel!

Now we find ourselves getting to the end of the line. We are running out of tract—as in the gastrointestinal tract from our digestive acids eroding our colon. Imagine all of the above symptoms ramped up to another level with the addition of mucus in the stool. This is the last stop on the line - Crohn’s. You don’t want to go there.

All of this pain and suffering can be avoided if you jump off that train early by seeking an alternative means of getting where you really want to go—perfect colon health.