Crohn’s Disease: No Cure?
A painful condition called Crohn’s Disease sometimes causes life-threatening complications. Digestive disorders are on the rise, due to the standard American diet and the toxic foods people eat every day. Those diagnosed with Crohn’s are told there’s no cure, or you have to be on medication for the rest of your life. But there are other options. Here’s Dr. Cindy Howard with a few insights about Crohn’s Disease.
Insights From Dr. Cindy Howard
Gastrointestinal health is so important in how we feel during the course of an entire day. What’s fascinating to me is, in clinical practice I’ve seen a huge incidence of auto-immune disease, as well. Put those two together, and what’s something that I see more and more commonly come into my office, and that’s a version of Irritable Bowel Disease, known as Crohn’s Disease.
Crohn’s Disease is an inflammatory disease that can actually be very debilitating. We see symptoms ranging anywhere from severe abdominal cramping, to chronic bloody diarrhea. The problem is this leads to further problems, such as, let’s say, even ulcers or the potential for blockages that then would require surgery.
For those of us that are dealing with this kind of condition, obviously we want to avoid surgery at all costs, right? And we want to see if there’s a way that we can address these issues so that we can get through the day feeling great, addressing both the auto-immune component and the GI component.
There’s some really great ways to look at this, which has really been fascinating for me over the years, because not only do we look at gut, but we look at how the immune system really affected us in the first place.
Let’s take a typical patient that gets diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, somewhere between the ages of 20 and 30. Not that that has to be, but that’s pretty average. We got so many more years of life to deal with these symptoms that can really affect our day-to-day activities. What can we do? Well, food is a big one. We know with any auto-immune disease the rule of thumb is, generically if you will, to cut out gluten. And we see these patients in our practice get much better when we eliminate gluten, but at the same time, one of the other food categories that’s extremely inflammatory, that we have to pay attention to, is dairy products. Causes a lot of inflammation, a lot of mucous in the gut, and can contribute to this chronic diarrhea that seems to be debilitating.
Even more importantly, we tend to ignore some things that we think are even healthy. We’ll run food sensitivity testing, where we take the individual’s blood, and specifically look for foods that are causing inflammation for them, so that we know what foods to eliminate, and can be very, very specific to care.
We also then want to look at that GI function that I told you was so important. There are things like bacteria, viruses, yeasts, fungus, that live in the gut, that sometimes we don’t even know are there, and if we can do some stool testing, as fun as that sounds, in order to determine if anything is present and eliminate it, a lot of times that’s going to reduce the inflammatory load too.
We know with these types of diseases, that if we can fix the inflammation, limit it, or eliminated it, and look at the immune system as to why it’s not functioning properly, we can downplay all of the side effects for this disease that really can be very devastating to a lot of you out there.
Treatments
Typical treatment is prescription medications. We take a list of symptoms, we find the proper medication to throw at it, and we hope that the patient is under control. What we see a lot of times, is that eventually those stop working, or again, in a severe state, it leads to surgery. I want everybody to know that just because you’re labeled with this Crohn’s Disease, doesn’t mean that’s something you have to live with and tolerate the symptoms. There are even some fantastic products that we can use out there, from a supplement standpoint, such as Slippery Elm, Aloe Vera, Peppermint. There’s a huge variety that you can talk to your wellness clinician about, in order to help you. It may even be as simple as replenishing a good prebiotic and a good probiotic.
I’m going to encourage all of you suffering from this disease out there, to talk to your wellness clinician. There’s tons of options versus the prescription meds that will help you control this, and certainly help you get through your day feeling much better.
If you’ve experienced abdominal pain, chronic diarrhea, anemia, fatigue, or perhaps you have some digestive problems that won’t go away. There are natural therapies that can get you back on track.
Life And Death Are In The Gut
I never recommend spending your time and money on over-the-counter or prescription drugs. In my 30 years of experience with patients who’ve had been on these drugs, the problem is never fixed, and many times the drugs only created more problems.
One of my mentors always said, “Life and death are in the gut.” Talk to your wellness clinician, and get started on a life-giving program that can reset, balance, and bring healing to your digestion. Call the clinic on this page to make an appointment.