When I hear the words irritable bowel syndrome, a picture forms in my mind of a very small, disgruntled troll living in the depths of the intestines. His name is Borborygmus, (the onomatopoeic, scientific name for that loud rumbling in your tummy) and he spends his days grumbling about a condition, which non-sufferers would be inclined to place halfway between a mild headache and a cold on the grand scale of ailments.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s probably fair to say that most sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome would challenge the use of the word irritable at the beginning of its woefully unsatisfactory name. Your bowel isn’t just irritable, it’s an angry, raging bull, intent on literally squeezing the life out of you. Chronic digestive symptoms can also make you feel more than a little irritable – they can make you down-right miserable. Chances are, if you happen to be one of the 17 million people who suffer with IBS in the UK, there probably aren’t many moments of the day that pass by without you thinking about it. And to add further insult to injury, this insufficient moniker IBS isn’t even a one-size fits all name; one third of sufferers endure bouts of diarrhoea (IBS-D), another third long stretches of constipation (IBS-C) and the rest wrestle with an unpredictable mixture of the two (IBS-M). All this wrapped up in a blanket of pain and discomfort; the persistent pain of being able to feel every squeeze of your intestines the moment anything tries to pass through them. Not to mention the confidence-impeding bouts of bloating, embarrassing episodes of borborygmus, topped off with a humiliating side order of excess gas; let’s face it, living with IBS can feel like an unwarranted prison sentence.
Furthermore, unlike the B in this disruptive disorder suggests, irritable bowel syndrome isn’t content to confine its symptoms to the bowel. It can have some other, frustrating, non-digestive symptoms too. Not only can it cause fatigue and headaches, IBS can also cause other cognitive effects like brain fog, and can even be the source of pain in the joints and other parts of the body. Irritating? Try infuriating.
What or who could be irritating your bowel?
Well, put plainly, there sadly is no single answer to this question. Many things or combination may be causing your digestive system to react in this exaggerated, dare I say it overinflated way. The list of causes is as long as your intestines and the ones named here are far from exhaustive:
- Chronic stress
- Food intolerances
- Nutritionally poor diet
- Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) which is an increase in the bacterial population in the small intestine.
- Previous history of antibiotic use
- Hormone imbalances (thyroid or chronic stress)
- Bacterial of viral infections
- History of traumatic brain injury
- Previous abdominal surgery
- History of endometriosis
What can we at Mosaic Medical do to help you?
So, you have some of the symptoms above, you take yourself off to the GP or purchase an armload of over-the-counter medications, sit back and wait for the results, right? Wrong. Because there are as many solutions for IBS as there are triggers, accurate assessment involves looking for the root cause, or causes and treating individuals accordingly. Which means, therefore there is no one-size-fits-all way to manage IBS. Because as Root Cause Doctors, we are trained in both conventional and functional medicine, we are uniquely positioned to look behind the symptoms to help you discover your individual triggers, and then we can work alongside your GP to help manage, as well as treat your symptoms. This treatment could come in the shape of a carefully managed combination of dietary interventions or changes to meal timing, specific supplements including probiotics and of course, some specific medications could also form part of the treatment plan.
So, once we’ve isolated the physical causes, alleviated and treated the symptoms, our job here is done and Borborygmus the troll is vanquished, yes? Not so fast, this gutsy, infuriating syndrome doesn’t stop there. Due to the constant interaction between our gut and our brain, it is common for excess stress to exacerbate IBS symptoms. My personal mental picture for this alliance is an army of tale-telling, antagonistic ants, who delight in marching up and down our spinal column from the stomach to the brain, passing notes literally behind our backs about how much chocolate and wine we’ve consumed. To the rest of the medical world it is known as the ‘gut-brain axis’, but I prefer my ant analogy.
I digress, my point being, because stress in the brain can cause havoc in the gut, conversely relaxation techniques can significantly help sufferers to alleviate symptoms. Which means taking simple steps to establish regular habits of mediation, yoga or gentle deep-breathing exercises, does not only have beneficial results on the condition itself, but has the added bonus of putting you in the driver’s seat to better manage your condition, as well as cope with the extra added stress that living with IBS brings. We use this structure as a framework on which to hang the many bejewelled facets of your personal treatment plan. Our aim, in a gut boosting nutshell, is to turn that heavy, angry troll residing in your abdomen into a small, manageable butterfly, that eventually flutters so gently, you barely even notice it’s there.
Drop us a line to find out how we can help you.
