Why Doesn't My Doctor Know This?: Conquering Irritable Bowel Syndromne, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Crohn's Disease and Colitis

by David Dahlman

Overview

You're miserable, your quality of life has changed, your medications don't help and your doctor had the nerve to tell you that diet has nothing to do with your condition. ...but you know better! You can conquer these symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Crohn's Disease and any form of Colitis: Gas, Bloating, Indigestion, Heartburn, Reflux, GERD, Diarrhea, Constipation, Alternating Diarrhea/Constipation, Abnormal Bowel Urgency, Abnormal Bowel Frequency, Pain, Spasms, Blood, Mucous, Hemorrhoids, Hiatal Hernia. Why Doesn't My Doctor Know This? Conquering Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Crohn's Disease and Colitis details the only physician designed step-by-step plan combined with dietary advice and an all natural supplement program. It will end your symptoms because it addresses these nine separate variables...Any or all of which may be the cause of your condition: *Altered levels of beneficial bacteria (probiotics)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781600373169
Publisher:	Morgan James Publishing
Publication date:	02/01/2008
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	7.04(w) x 10.04(h) x 0.53(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

What IBS Is and What IBS Isn't

Discussing what irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) isn't can be just as interesting as discussing what it is. In fact, it might help you more completely understand what IBS is.

If you haven't been able to get an answer to your problem from your conventional medical doctor and you've been trying to figure it out yourself, you may have jumped to a wrong conclusion or two. One common conclusion is that IBS is caused by stress. Since IBS is so prevalent and other family members seem to also have it, another common conclusion is that it's genetic. Much confusion surrounds IBS. In this chapter, we will wash away the misconceptions and define what IBS really is, allowing you to focus on the steps necessary to eliminate your symptoms.

WHAT IBS ISN'T

The researchers who study IBS spend most of their time looking at sophisticated elements of gastrointestinal function and the accompanying laboratory findings. Needless to say, if your gastrointestinal system is unhealthy, you will have many abnormal findings and imbalanced chemical markers. Since most of the research into IBS is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, the goal of the research is to determine what is out of balance and then to apply and test the medications developed by the sponsoring companies to manage the imbalances. The goal is not to eliminate these imbalances, but just to control them.

Stress and Abnormal Laboratory Findings

Remember the popular philosophical question, "What came first — the chicken or the egg?" Interestingly enough, we can ask that same question about IBS, stress, and functional changes.

Stress

Your stress is not what came first. I can say that with complete certainty. Yes, I know that when you become stressed, your symptoms increase, sometimes reaching the point where they feel like they're out of control. Because of this, it seems to make sense that stress is what's causing your problem. Wrong! Stop thinking like a conventional medical doctor.

It's that failed critical-thought process that has some conventional medical doctors putting people with IBS on antidepressants. The antidepressants will calm these people, whom these doctors believe are always stressed, take life too hard, or are just too emotional about things. The antidepressants may or may not help the IBS. Sometimes they help it for a while, but then the symptoms return. So now these people with IBS symptoms are also on medications that produce their own side effects, with no plan to get off them.

What we're faced with here is the age-old chicken-or-egg question. What came first — the stress or the imbalanced gastrointestinal system? Does stress cause a gastrointestinal system to become imbalanced, or is an imbalanced gastrointestinal system more affected by stress than a balanced one? Do you really think you've endured so much stress that your gastrointestinal system has become imbalanced and decided to seek revenge by inflicting upon you the myriad symptoms you've been experiencing? Do you think that as an additional insult, it has decided to cooperate even less when you're under the most stress? Or, was there another reason your gastrointestinal system went out of balance? Combine the imbalance with stress and your gastrointestinal system goes crazy, with your symptoms flaring. Let's say it another way: Stress only exacerbates the symptoms associated with an unhealthy gastrointestinal system. Period! Conversely, if you have a healthy, balanced gastrointestinal system, you will find yourself affected by stress in a completely different way. In fact, your gastrointestinal system may not revolt at all, or at the very least, it won't revolt as much.

The proof of this for me is that I never take level of stress into consideration when treating the patients in my office. You will never hear me say, "I'm sorry, but I think your life is too stressful and I won't be able to help you." I treat all people without regard to stress level, and everyone improves in my practice.

Furthermore, former patients who've had their beneficial bacteria population reestablished and their chemistry restored never tell me that everything is great except in times of stress. In fact, they tell me just the opposite. They say that even in stressful situations, their gastrointestinal systems don't revolt the way they used to.

Abnormal Laboratory Findings

Conventional medical doctors and researchers, when confronted with a health problem, usually try to test the affected organ or organ system to determine what physiological functions or chemistry markers are out of their "normal" ranges. If the heart is the issue, they look at cardiac output, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and heart enzymes. If the liver is the problem, they again look at enzymes. If the brain is the area of concern, they test brain chemistry and cognitive function, and may employ computerized axial tomography (CAT scanning) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The same is true if the gastrointestinal system is the culprit. An organ system of such enormous size and importance has a lot of things that can go wrong. Luckily, doctors also have a good number of chemical markers they can check and tests they can run. A colonoscopy can detect cancer, polyps, and areas of inflammation. An endoscopy (a camera snaked down the throat into the stomach) can find ulcers and other areas of inflammation. Other tests determine if too much or too little hydrochloric acid is being produced in the stomach, how quickly the stomach empties of food, how long it takes food to transit the entire length of the system (gut motility), and how well the gallbladder and pancreas are functioning.

Much of the research that has been conducted on the gastrointestinal system has been centered on the findings that most people with IBS also suffer from impaired gut motility, a condition in which food transits the gastrointestinal system too slowly or too quickly; visceral hypersensitivity, a condition in which the nerves attached to the gut that react to stress are overly sensitive; and decreased levels of serotonin, the chemical, produced in the tissue of the gastrointestinal system, that is most responsible for preventing depression and maintaining our sense of well-being.

And again we come to the question: What came first? Did something happen to you that caused you to develop a slow or fast transit time, visceral hypersensitivity, or decreased serotonin levels, and then you developed your IBS symptoms? Or, did you lose your bacterial balance, which caused your chemistry to change, which led to your gastrointestinal system becoming unhealthy and showing abnormal test findings?

I'm sure you know by now what I believe. Proof again for me is that if slow or fast transit time, visceral hypersensitivity, and decreased serotonin levels were issues unto themselves, my protocol to reestablish proper bacterial balance and restore chemistry would never eliminate IBS symptoms. Instead, almost every one of my patients who uses my protocol sees a complete elimination of symptoms, and my guess is that if I retested these people for slow or fast transit time, visceral hypersensitivity, and decreased serotonin levels, the results would show they had returned to normal.

Genetics

Within each of us lies the potential for health or a lack of health. Which one we experience depends on the selections we make throughout life in regard to our overall environment and, more specifically, our nutritional environment. For example, some women have the gene for breast cancer but never suffer from the disease. Other people have genes for high cholesterol or heart disease but don't experience either of these chronic health conditions. The one main influence to which we all must expose our genes is the environment we create within our bodies by the foods we eat.

The new field of study called nutrigenomics examines how diet influences genetic expression and, ultimately, overall health. In other words, a bad gene will not necessarily express itself and cause a disease or health condition. It must first be exposed to variables that will cause it to express itself in the manner of a disease or health condition.

I don't know how many times patients have explained to me that their sibling, parent, or grandparent has their same symptoms, so the problem must be genetic. "Is there any hope?" they always ask. Of course, there's hope, I answer. The gastrointestinal condition may have a genetic component to it, but if we address the variables that have allowed these genes to express themselves, we will have a solution.

We're back to the old story about the loss of the bacterial balance in the gut causing, over time, a change in the chemical environment within the gut, which leads to the development of IBS symptoms. And what altered the bacterial balance and set this cascade of events into motion? Antibiotics, another environmental variable! And what do you and your sibling, parent, and maybe even grandparent all have in common? You all took antibiotics and set off the "bad" genes. And remember that antibiotics aren't the only cause, just the primary cause. Other factors that all humans share can contribute to why you and your relatives have symptoms (variables) associated with the gastrointestinal system that caused your genes to turn on you.

The next generation of holistic and alternative physicians will investigate health concerns using genetic testing, determining whether or not a person has "bad" genes and then treating that person using dietary manipulation and nutritional supplementation.

So, let's get back to the basics. Nothing fancy is going on. Don't worry about stress or genetics. You can't do anything about them anyway. Just listen to your good ol' down-home common sense, which is telling you somewhere, deep in the back of your mind, that you know something specific is causing your problem.

WHAT IBS IS

I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say they have gastrointestinal problems but they didn't know they had IBS. Many people suffer for many years, going from doctor to doctor, when suddenly one doctor finally diagnoses them with IBS. Why weren't these people diagnosed with IBS from the start? If you have a cough, you know you have a cough. If you have asthma or a headache, you know it. Why the confusion surrounding the diagnosis of IBS?

Where did the name "irritable bowel syndrome" come from? You can be sure it was coined by conventional medical people. According to the medical mindset, all symptoms and sets of symptoms must have names. How in the world can the pharmaceutical companies develop medications for things that don't have names?

It's easy to understand where the "irritable bowel" part of the name came from, but it's a little more difficult to understand why the word "syndrome" began to be used. According to the dictionaries, a syndrome is a number of symptoms occurring together and characterizing a specific disease. First of all, IBS is not a disease. It's a condition. Furthermore, IBS is not characterized by a single symptom or a specific set of symptoms. It expresses itself in a wide variety of symptoms, with different combinations of these symptoms occurring in different people. The specific symptoms a person experiences depends on that person's particular genetic strengths and weaknesses and biochemical individuality. This leads to confusion, because if you have one set of symptoms and a friend of yours has a different set of symptoms, do you both have IBS? If another friend has just one uncomfortable symptom, does that person have IBS? The answer is that all of you have IBS, but more importantly, that all of you have symptoms that you really wish would go away.

My definition of IBS is: Any uncomfortable single symptom or set of symptoms associated with the gastrointestinal tract. The possible symptoms include the following:

[check] Gas

[check] Bloating

[check] Indigestion

[check] Heartburn

[check] Reflux (backflow of small amounts of food from the stomach to the esophagus)

[check] Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)

[check] Nausea

[check] Vomiting

[check] Diarrhea

[check] Constipation

[check] Alternating diarrhea and constipation

[check] Abnormal bowel frequency

[check] Abnormal bowel urgency

[check] Incomplete evacuation

[check] Cramping

[check] Sense of fullness

[check] Hemorrhoids

[check] Anal fissures (cracking of the skin of the anus)

[check] Fistulas

[check] Anal itching

[check] Mouth sores

[check] Ulcers in any part of the gastrointestinal tract

[check] Pain

[check] Gastritis (inflammation of the stomach lining)

[check] Esophagitis (inflammation of the esophagus)

[check] Gallstones or poorly functioning gallbladder

Any single symptom or combination of symptoms from this list can create discomfort. For some people, the only symptom may be diarrhea, while other people may have diarrhea, gas, bloating, and heartburn. Some people may have a combination of constipation and reflux, while still others have just a lot of embarrassing gas. Doctors only need to listen to their patients' complaints. They really don't need to give the complaints a name.

YOUR STORY

You are not alone. Most IBS sufferers travel a common path as they try to figure out — either by themselves or with the help of a conventional medical doctor — what's wrong with them. Reviewing this path will help you see that your frustration is justified. It will also help you see that your frustration has also been a good thing, since it has led you to continue looking and fighting for the solution that you know is out there.

The Path Well Traveled

It begins with a new pain, some stomach gurgling, a little heartburn, maybe gas and bloating you never had before, or a change in bowel habits. You don't really take too much notice at first. You can live with it. It's not a big deal.

It continues. You thought it would go away, but it doesn't, so you begin to self-medicate with an over-the-counter product. For gas and bloating, heartburn, or reflux, you take an antacid such as Tagamet, Pep-sid AC, Turns, Rolaids or Nexium. Your symptoms are so common that television advertisements for these products run throughout the day and especially at dinnertime, making them the top-selling category of over-the-counter medications in the United States. If they don't work, you're off to your physician, for a four-to-six-minute visit with someone who's probably not listening and sends you off with a prescription for Prilosec (as of 2007, available over-the-counter) or stronger prescription Nexium. Did you know that the most common side effects of Nexium are headaches, diarrhea, and abdominal pain? What are the medical experts thinking? Though the use of antacids seems reasonable and safe, these products have side effects, which I will discuss in Chapter 3.

If your complaint is diarrhea or loose bowel movements, you guzzle Imodium or Pepto-Bismol. If it's constipation, you reach for Haley's M-O, Metamucil, Citrucel, or Fibercon, and a stool softener. Fiber products are usually not high in quality, using raw materials that tend to be rough on the insides of the digestive tract, and can escort nutrition out of the body. This causes a malabsorption problem, which can have long-term consequences. If your constipation continues, you're off to your friendly doctor again, this time for Propulsid or the latest ineffective solution.

Somewhere along the way, you realize that certain foods exacerbate your problem, and you begin to avoid them or become afraid to eat. You may become afraid to leave the house, and when you do, you make sure you know the location of every bathroom between your home and your destination.

If pain is among your symptoms, you take aspirin, ibuprofen, or another non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). NSAIDs are the second most common over-the-counter medication sold today. Regular use of aspirin or NSAIDs can damage the gastrointestinal system. (For a discussion of this, see "Use of Prescription and Over-the-Counter Medications" in Chapter 3.)

Since none of these over-the-counter or prescription medications or dietary changes solves your problem, you're off to your favorite well-intentioned physician once more. By now, your doctor is probably tired of seeing someone that he or she doesn't really have the tools or knowledge to help, so he or she refers you to a gastroenterologist.

The Good News/Bad News Trip to the Gastroenterologist

Gastroenterologists are specialists in the intestinal tract. They're trained to perform surgery and unique testing to rule out more serious conditions, including cancer. However, IBS usually escapes them. If you make an appointment with a gastroenterologist, you stand a good chance of walking away with a recommendation for a treatment that falls within their area of expertise. In other words, the gastroenterologist is most likely going to recommend testing or surgery.

The tests your gastroenterologist may recommend include a colonoscopy, an endoscopy, a barium enema, an MRI, and a CAT scan. By the end of your experience, you'll have been tested up this way and down that way, just to receive your first good news/bad news — all the tests came back negative, which is great because it means you're going to live, but is bad because you still have nothing to hang your hat on. And whatever's been wrong with you is still wrong.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Why doesn't my doctor know this?"
by .
Copyright © 2008 David Dahlman.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
Introduction,
1. What IBS Is and What IBS Isn't,
2. Why Doesn't My Doctor Know This?,
3. The Lifestyle Influences Leading to IBS,
4. The Supplements,
5. The Big Four Don't-You-Dare-Break-'Em Dietary Rules,
6. The Step-by-Step Thought Process,
7. Why You Have Other Health Complaints,
8. IBS in Children and Teens,
9. Crohn's Disease and Any Type of Colitis,
10. Hiatal Hernia,
Conclusion,
Appendix: Alternative Medicine Techniques to Avoid,
Resource List:,
Where to Purchase the Recommended Supplements,
Laboratory Tests,
About the Author,
Free Bonus Offer,
References,