What do I have in common with a Gastroenterologist, a bowel specialist? Well we both see patients with very severe bowel symptoms. I usually see the patient long after all the visits to the specialists, the tests and a diagnosis has been made and the patient put on medication to control the symptoms. Surgery is often done in the long run, if the patient doesn’t get a chance to try complementary medicine first. What I wish is that patients found me first, try easy safe medicines and diet first and if they don’t work then resort to the big guns like cortisone and surgery. The following two patients are good examples.

Joe, a 12 year old boy, has been having a tug-o-war, as he puts it, in his stomach since the age of 2. He can’t tolerate dairy products, but even avoiding those doesn’t help much in controlling his symptoms. He would have very severe symptoms every two weeks, where he would wake up at 2 am in abdominal pain, have explosive bowel movements and it would take him one week to settle down, and then one week later we would have another. His mother’s big concern also was how pale he was with dark circles under his eyes and his lack of appropriate weight gain for his age.
Now Joe is one of my stellar patients! He followed my instructions to the tee. He avoided all gluten and carbohydrate foods as outlined in Elaine Gottschall’s book, Breaking the Vicious Cycle, which I recommend for some of the more serious cases. Joe’s improvement did not come by eliminating wheat or gluten alone, but by also reducing a lot of the carbohydrates that really aggravate all Irrritable Bowel types, like Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn’s Disease, Diverticulitis, and Cystic Fibrosis. He finds the diet challenging but he knows now what aggravates him, so he is happy to avoid these things so that he no longer has any pain or bowel troubles. He has been on the diet for over one year now, and I told him that I would write about him, as some of my forty year old patients can’t stay on the diet for one month, let along one year! I also use a special fish protein supplement which speeds this healing process, and also a variety of pro-biotics like acidophilus,that help to re-colonize the gut with healthy gut bacteria. He is gaining weight, his color and energy have improved and he is having no more attacks. He is still trying new recipes with the help of his dedicated mother and is using the nut flours found in the recipes in the book are more than adequate substitutes for baking etc. For instance,I have an awesome pancake recipe. These pancakes can be frozen and re-heated in the toaster for a quick easy snack. Joe relies on these a lot.

Mary, another of my patients, has been to the Mayo clinic, diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, has seen the top (GI) gastrointestinal specialists in Vancouver and still no results after many years! I put her on my program and she was better in two weeks, BECAUSE SHE FOLLOWED IT PRECISELY! She told me that her GI specialist said it didn’t matter what she ate, only eat a balanced diet. He did not outline what that meant. She was given a drug called Asacol which was to be taken dally by mouth and by enema when she was having a relapse. Now she knows the cause of most of her symptoms and she feels she is much more in control as she knows what to avoid. I often also recommend to these patients that we do specialized parasite stool testing, as they get missed on routine medical testing. In some of my patients all symptoms have cleared once the parasites are gone, and they don’t need to follow a restrictive diet either! So take the inspiration of these patients, of which I have seen many, and realize that you too could be without irritable bowel symptoms, if you only worked at it!