Ibs Netaccess Article
Hope for IBS Sufferers
Unfortunately, current studies indicate that at least twenty percent of the world’s population is afflicted with irritable bowel syndrome. These people suffer from extreme stomach pain, and constantly fight with constipation and diarrhea, they control one, and then find themselves to be afflicted with the other, there doesn’t seem to be a normal for them, it is either they are constipated, or they treat the constipation and end up with diarrhea, or vice versa. Luckily, there are a few people who only suffer from the symptoms of this disease when they eat the wrong type of food, or when they face a particularly stressful event in their lives. Many however, suffer from often disabling symptoms that greatly interfere with their quality of life. There are few treatments that are able to even alleviate the symptoms of IBS, which means that those who suffer from this disabling disease often succumb to depression.
This disease is most often found in women, and does not prefer one race, or age above another. Men and children also are afflicted with this disease, but no where near as often or as severely as women. People who suffer from extreme IBS are often afraid to leave home, for fear of being unable to control their bowels, and due to the chronic pain that they are always in. IBS causes many people to lose their jobs due to attendance issues, as well as can get children into trouble for being absent from school. People who don’t know much about IBS, or who have never had to deal with it, don’t understand why you can’t just take a pill and come on in to work or school, they don’t understand that it simply doesn’t work that way.
No medical researcher has been able to come up with one specific cause of IBS. When patients come in exhibiting symptoms of IBS, physician’s rule out other causes for those symptoms, such as, Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, Cealiacs disease, or Candida infection, doctor’s must rule out these causes first, because there is no test that can specifically determine whether or not a person has IBS. If the symptoms fit, and the physician can find no other underlying cause for the complaints that the patient has, then most likely he will diagnose that patient as having IBS.
Many physicians use what is known as the Rome criteria for determining whether or not a patient is afflicted with IBS. In using the Rome criteria, the physician will ask the patient about the frequency of their symptoms within the past year, and if that patient has suffered from abdominal pain for at least twelve weeks out of that year, there is a good chance he has IBS, especially if the pain is relieved when the patient is able to use the bathroom, or if along with the pain they noticed less or more frequent stools, or a change in the appearance of their bowl movements. There are some other symptoms that may also lead your physician to diagnose you as having IBS, including diarrhea or constipation, bowel movements that you can see mucous in and unusual bloating.
Along with being difficult to diagnose, there are not very many treatment options that seem to help IBS sufferers either. If you suffer from diarrhea and constipation, you can try over the counter medications, such as Imodium and Milk of Magnesia, but most patients say that those types of medicines don’t really help relieve their symptoms, and if you use those medicines too often, they can be harmful to you. Most people get the best results from changing their diet, so that they eliminate the foods they know cause them problems. Since stress is also known to make IBS symptoms more severe, you should also learn how to control your stress, and try to find outlets for it, such as relaxation techniques, physical exercise, etc.
But, hopefully there is a treatment that will be available soon, it was tested successfully in 1998 in a clinical trial done at a university in Australia. The trial participants were given some Chinese natural herbal treatments to help lessen the severity of their pain, and help better regulate their bowel habits, so they didn’t suffer from so many episodes of diarrhea and constipation. Since this trial was so effective, some scientists say that this may end up being used as a widely prescribed treatment for IBS.
