7 ms·

For me, the thing that sucks most about IBS is the medication. The link between mind/body/pain/inflammation is pretty obvious when you start taking strong anti-

• serverholic 5y ago
  I have autonomic-dysfunction, basically my nervous system malfunctions in (luckily) mild ways. I've noticed that if I go from an unhealthy lifestyle to suddenly living a healthy lifestyle there's often a period where I feel sick, pale, and faint. Luckily this effect only lasts a few days for me but it's made me wonder if our bodies find ways around malfunctioning and then can't adjust quickly enough if the malfunction is reduced or removed.
  • skim_milk 5y ago
    That's interesting! My situation is the exact opposite, there's a very tight positive correlation between good mental health and reduced gut symptoms. e.g. my gut problems completely disappear when I'm driving or hiking, my favorite activities. Gut problems re-appear with mental stress, and find me a toilet fast! Really I couldn't have asked for a better problem to deal with. The correlation between mind/gut health is so instantaneous and powerful, my child brain got Pavlovian-conditioned to deal with mental stress. I couldn't just dissociate from mental pain, I really had to understand and deal with causes of stress in a healthy way, otherwise I would be forced to the floor in the fetal position from all the cramps. Platitudes about always listening to your gut are funny, taken both literally and figuratively that's my life!
    • nefitty 5y ago
      Seriously, talk about tight feedback loops. Anxiety feels like somebody hooked it up to guitar amps. Any slight perturbance and alarms go off. I have not been super successful in mentally wrangling it, but there's always hope.
      • skim_milk 5y ago
        Have you tried any psychotherapies or responded positively to any? Getting exposed to situations that left me vulnerable emotionally ultimately led me to the insights and epiphanies I needed to overcome that vulnerability, kind of like EMDR therapy. E.g. social anxieties disappeared once I forcefully put myself out there and realized none of this matters, I can deal with rejection positively. In the most extreme case, I had a panic attack from an incident with THC that I am certain would have left me dead had I access to a firearm which uncovered thoughts and emotions that I was hiding from myself that I later was forced to confront and eventually heal - learning how apply a "it really do be like that" mentality productively, not too much or too little and only at the right times. Internal Family Systems was also necessary for me to understand what made up the ""real me"" and what was split-off misunderstood defenses from childhood stress, defenses of which actually caused stress and pain all said and done! While painful at first, it eventually blew over and I slowly learned how to more optimally integrate and control stress responses.
        • nefitty 5y ago
          I haven't tried any therapy. I'm not sure at what point the benefits outweigh the cost in time and money. I'll look into it further as I've honestly never considered it as a treatment for gastro problems.
    • wnolens 5y ago
      Interesting, you just helped me possibly connect something in my own life. When I was a kid I used hate using school toilets. And I was a highly anxious kid which would present as stomach butterflies. I dealt with constipation as a kid, which further made me nervous because I'd experience it AT school and be too afraid to sit down a while at school. Fast forward 20 years, the most stressful time of my life (moving cities, dealing with depression, mom got cancer, ...) and I developed IBS-C. My intestines don't move thing along, need to stimulate with drugs. Unfortunately it hasn't gone away.
• emerongi 5y ago
  Above all, for all readers: talk about these things with your doctors. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence online and it's just like negative reviews: the people with positive experiences aren't really talking about it much. As someone with a bowel disease, I can thank medicine for giving me my life back.
  • MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    Another data point: I started Prednisolone 5mg a month ago, it has markedly boosted my energy levels. I hope this goes on forever.
    • inter_netuser 5y ago
      5mg daily? Or once a month?
    • nanidin 5y ago
      5mg is the level my SO refuses to go beyond for daily dosage. At 10mg she starts to cry every day.
      • MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
        Reasonable, you really want to stay below the Cushing limit.
    • hnzix 5y ago
      Be careful to talk with your doc about Prednisolone's potential long term effects on bone density. It's great as a quick fix though.
      • MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
        Is there a way to compensate?
        • fredoliveira 5y ago
• kerneltime 5y ago
  I recently came across a term "Functional Medicine" https://www.ifm.org https://www.ifm.org which looks at the body as a whole and tries to root cause metabolic issues which can often result in IBS cures.. most older medicinal practices always considered the body as a unified system which make sense in terms of how it is engineered but modern medicine tries to break things down and often misses the cross specialization impacts. Best of luck!
  • Schroedingersat 5y ago
    How is this far enough from the default to even have a word, let alone separate training?
    • kerneltime 5y ago
      Yeah don't talk to a DB admin about SQL compiler issues.. :-P
      • Schroedingersat 5y ago
        Yeah, but any competent DB admin will at least read the logs, do a few A/B tests, blocking out different parts or using queries which should be equivalent and then say 'something is hinky with the way this query is compiling, query z seems to give a different answer if query y is written like foo even though I see no link. Probably a subtle bug in your code I haven't spotted. Maybe ask someone who knows more about the compilation step?' Even if they 'solve' it by rewriting query y, they'll not claim that query y was the problem, and may even leave a comment or commit log saying they didn't understand why writing it like har fixed it.
        • kerneltime 5y ago
          Note the word competent.. Also, insurance companies will often have opinions on what tests were valid and might reject paying for tests. So if a DB admin spins up a cluster to debug his hunch of a SQL Compiler issue, that bill will be paid by the customer and not the insurance and might bankrupt the customer.. I had an apt with a cardiologist where he literally read a standard template of care and when I tried to see if he is interested diving deeper into inflammation causes, tests and ways to avoid the standard medications which only deal with symptoms he was least interested as it all dealt with metabolic issues and not the heart per se.. the system is run to see how can a patient be billed and who owns the organ. Insurance companies have swim lanes and medical practitioners are educated and trained to remain in those swim lanes.. as long as things are kept simple for prescribed cures and billing, the gravy train continues.. it not in their best interest to solve the problem. Have you ever been to a annual physical where god forbid you discuss issues that are not part of the normal annual health checkup? You will actually be asked to schedule a separate appointment as the billing for that is separate.. A lot of "functional medicine" happens outside of insurance payment coverage. Some more interesting things to follow: https://cholesterolcode.com/ https://cholesterolcode.com/ https://cynthialimd.com/faqs/ https://cynthialimd.com/faqs/
• mfer 5y ago
  I’ve been reading, from medical doctors, about how inflammation is tied to diet. There are a bunch of papers on it. “Fiber Fueled” was an interesting book to explain what’s going on. Have you looked at the impact of diet?
  • nefitty 5y ago
    Sorry, this is not helpful. I guarantee you that anyone who suffers gastrointestinal disorders has considered their diet. The pain sometimes feel like a bottomless pit of suffering.
    • mfer 5y ago
      I had GI issues and talked to doctors about it. Not a single one of them said anything about diet. Looking back at it is rather frustrating. When I first learned about diet the advice was terrible. It didn’t work. Now that I have a good conceptual model for my GI track and food it all makes more sense.
      • cpncrunch 5y ago
        For me (well controlled IBS), diet only seems to be a minor factor. It can be very difficult to really figure out if any particular food is causing a problem, or if it's some other factor. You need to test the food multiple times under different circumstances. For myself, I did think that certain foods caused problems. But I've since realised that I can eat pretty much all of those foods without problem. There are certain things that I'm careful about (alcohol, and wine in particular, sugary drinks, and coffee), but even those I can tolerate in moderation. The only thing that reliably causes symptoms for me is stress (100% of the time).
    • blix 5y ago
      I fully understand where you are coming from, but do not discount the power of diet. I found, that in order to see a real difference, I had to move ~very~ far away from my old habits. It can be a scary thing to do.
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• DantesKite 5y ago
  > a relative of mine committed suicide after taking steroids for IBS with absolutely no evident mental problems before treatment, I'm sorry about your relative. I had a terrible reaction too. Corticosteroids caused downregulation of androgen receptors and for a few months, I was in a desperate place. I found Tribulus could upregulate androgen receptors (and seemingly, a few non-androgen ones) and it saved me.
• blix 5y ago
  I had pretty crazy side effects from biologics (ultimately I feel they made things worse). No one believes sick people though :P
• hourislate 5y ago
  Have you considered BPC 157? There has been some research that it can be beneficial. There are some user discussion on r/Peptides concerning BPC157 and IBS, etc. Brain-gut Axis and Pentadecapeptide BPC 157: Theoretical and Practical Implications https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333585/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333585/
• alfor 5y ago
  A friend of mine was dying from it at the hospital. Strong medication, followed by stronger one and then experimental ones that cost thousand a pill. At some point he said ’fuck it, if I going to die it’s going to be in the sun’ (he lived in cold Canada.) He went to Mexico and completely recover without any drugs, eating anything he wanted. I later found there is a strong connection with vitamin D deficiency and autoimmune diseases. Look into functional medicine if you haven’t, basically the idea of giving what a normal body need to function properly ( good food, sleep, friends, family, sun, etc, probiotics) and mostly get out of the way.
  • tharkun__ 5y ago
    I could definitely see how low Vitamin D could be bad for you (well we already know it's bad for you actually). What I'd like to know - even though it's an anecdotal data point from one guy only - what does anything he wants actually mean? I.e. did he somehow eat his regular Canadian diet in Mexico or did he eat more local? Asking because IBS is a bowel disease and gut micro biome I would gather can play a large role as well.
    • nextaccountic 5y ago
      Maybe your gut microbiome doesn't depend on just which foods you eat but also on the environment it is prepared and other environmental factors. I mean, perhaps in Mexico there were different microorganisms in the same foodstuff
      • tharkun__ 5y ago
        Definitely possible though I would assume the two go hand in hand. Take cabbage. Eating cabbage will allow certain microbes in your gut to thrive. But only if they are there in the first place. Different experiment: Let cabbage sit in salt in an anaerobic environment for some time. Then eat it. Now the cabbage brings the beneficial microbes to the gut and helps them thrive there. Cabbage with salt in an anaerobic environment makes Sauerkraut. Salt let's certain microbes survive but not others. The final lactobacillus that do survive themselves produce an acidic environment that further results in many non beneficial microbes dying. Many cultures have similar food preparation techniques that turn out to be beneficial. Kimchi being similar - and part of the health craze nowadays. I asked because I would associate lots of beans and such with foods in Mexico and beans make for a very different gut micro biome than the regular western diet. That's why someone on a western diet will pass a lot of gas when eating beans from time to time, as the bacterial makeup changes while eating lots of beans will have the opposite effect when eating a western carb diet from time to time. Been there. Done both :)
• dzonga 5y ago
  this is the problem with western medicine. where medication is the end all be all. various cultures have known since time immemorial that the gut is linked to healthy brain function. hence why most cultures have a form of fasting, advocate drinking fermented drinks / foods such as yoghurt, kefir, beer etc. there's certain foods that you eat and feel your blood draw to a halt and you feel lethargic. then there's certain foods that you eat and your brain fires up, and you feel blood rushing.