Inflammation, Not Irritation

“One medical group in Canada thinks it has found it, and their results have led to a new therapy. Using advanced confocal laser imaging techniques, this group discovered that many people who are long-time sufferers from what was considered IBS have the same problem as sufferers from IBD (inflammatory bowel disease).” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—12/3/2012—The bowels of between 10 percent and 15 percent of Americans, the majority women, are chronically irritated. These folks suffer cramping, nausea, pain and irregularity. Seeking relief, they jam the offices of gastroenterologists. They get a lot of tests, but no relief.

The tests usually reveal nothing.

“You have no organic damage,” chirps the medico. “You must have irritable bowel syndrome.”

No organic damage; you’ve got a syndrome. Organic damage; you’ve got a disease.

That’s just quibbling over words. To these people, what they have feels like a disease: it hurts, and remedies are scarce and mostly unavailing.

Now the idea is surfacing that the so-called diagnosis, one of excluding most other possible visceral ailments, is plain wrong.

There is often organic damage; it’s just hard to find.

One medical group in Canada thinks it has found it, and their results have led to a new therapy.

Using advanced confocal laser imaging techniques, this group discovered that many people who are long-time sufferers from what was considered IBS have the same problem as sufferers from IBD (inflammatory bowel disease).

They have gaps in the lining of the end of the small intestine—the ileum—that allow harmful bacterial substances to migrate from the lumen, or inside of the gut, where they are bottled up, to its outer structures. Once freed from their confines, these bacteria elicit protective inflammatory responses from the body’s cytokine or immune system.

Thus, there is a fair chance that IBD, which is normally considered an auto-immune disease causing serious gut inflammation, and IBS are one and the same.

The irritation is really just an attenuated inflammation. As such, it is treatable with anti-inflammatories.

The medical group administered one of the more potent, mesalamine, with highly successful preliminary results.

This is obviously good news for those who have been told for years that their IBS was a “functional, psychophysical” ill, perhaps treatable only with anti-depressives or psychotherapy.

They may be pardoned, however, for remaining irritated with, or perhaps inflamed at, those medicos who were so long dismissive of their complaints.