Bowel Syndrome
What is a Bowel Syndrome?
When you suffer from pain in the stomach, bloating, wind and diarrhea; you may see a doctor. If your symptoms are long enough to warrant investigation, he will make sure there is no illness or sign of alarm in your symptoms. At this point, you are likely to receive symptom based treatment with the hope that you will resolve.
Medicine is designed to detect illness, the one that could have health consequences if ignored. You may have symptoms which may not kill you if ignored, but will affect your quality of life. A physician would label this situation as “IBS”, – I have ruled out ‘diseases of consequence’, assuming that reassuring you will make the distraction of symptoms less so you would forget.
It could happen that your symptoms are real. Pain incapacitates you, frequency of stools, restricts your social life. We need to ‘split hairs’, to find out what could be causing these symptoms.
The possible reasons could be
- Unfriendly bacteria growing in the gut
- You being sensitive to some foods
- You may be allergic to some foods
- Your immune response to some foods is abnormal.
- Your intestinal muscles may cause “hurry”.
- Signals from the intestine to the brain, do nor “switch off” after the reporting is done
- Early life experiences may have changed the way you deal with stress.
