Trading in Problems

WARNING - this post discusses GI functionality. I will do my best to avoid any graphic language, but be aware. You have been warned.

For as long as I can remember, I've had tummy problems. Actually, that's not strictly true; for most of my life, my tummy problems were transitory, came and went depending on my diet. A number of years ago, possibly around the time of my military service, but I could be mistaken, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was getting cramping, bloating, and motility issues.  I thought, for sure, it was the large quantities of milk I was drinking every day, because when I stopped, so did my tummy problems. Lactose sensitivity was, I believe, only the beginning, because when I cut dairy from my diet, the problems went away for a while, but then came back just as strong.

It got to the point where nothing I eat sits well. Within a handful of hours of eating, my tummy blows up like a balloon, so I now only eat at night, knowing that at least if I'm asleep, I don't have to try to do anything when my tummy pain is at it's worst.  I was diagnosed with IBS-C, which I will leave to you to look up if you are not familiar.

IBS isn't so much a diagnosis as an acknowledgement of distress. There's no known cause, no known cure, and the treatments are lifestyle and amazingly strict dietary changes that severely impact quality of life, assuming they even work (for many, including myself, they do not). Additionally, IBS is more of a compilation of symptoms than an actual condition, as the criterion for it are quite broad and overlap with numerous other, known, conditions. Frankly I think it's a cop out; patient gets a diagnosis, which is all some of them want, but that's it. Once you have an IBS diagnosis, that's more or less where your guided treatment (with doctors) ends, because most of them have absolutely no clue what to do, and yes, that does include, for the most part, GI specialists.

So I started doing my own research on the symptoms I experience, and I brought this info to my doctors, both to get their opinion of it, and see if there was any way they could help. Mind, I'm not getting paid to do their job for them, but I certainly should be. I'm not entirely negative on doctors, but I'm absolutely balls-to-the-wall frustrated by their lack of giving a shit. I realize that there are a plethora of new ailments these days, likely caused by the industrial lifestyle we live today, and that's difficult to keep up with and all, but when your doctor asks, every visit, "Where would you like to see your treatment go? What do you think would help? Is there any treatment you'd like to try?" it really emphasizes that they aren't doing any looking on their own. Isn't that what doctors are supposed to want to do? Learn how to help their patients find relief, even if it means doing a bit of *gasp* continued education? After all, a doctor who has done the bare-minimum professional development (continued learning) will be out-of-date on a lot of info, and the longer they have been practicing, the more outdated their information becomes.

It's not my job to be a doctor, to do a buttload of research, to suggest my own treatment. I don't know what I'm doing, medically, but because I find the topic quite interesting, and go out of my way to learn about biology and medicine, I probably know a lot more than the average person. I shudder to think what the average person goes through when they hear something like that, especially if they don't have the innate drive to research that I have developed. I believe this is a symptom of a larger problem; it goes along with drug companies marketing direct to uninformed consumers, rather than to doctors, as they should, and are required to do in many parts of the world where direct-to-consumer drug marketing is banned. They are relying on people with no knowledge of biochemistry, hormones, anatomy, organ interactions, etc etc etc, to request their drug based on misleading commercials. And people do exactly that. Because the commercial tells them to talk to their doctor about it, when the doctor should be talking to them about it. That whole system is a disaster-mess, and it's WRONG. Wrong and harmful, depressing, alarming, and it makes the patient feel worthless. If their doctor doesn't even care enough to suggest another treatment, the patient must be complaining too much, or have a problem the doctor doesn't care to solve.

Consider it this way; you are having a house built. You hire an architect to design the building, which turns out to be very complicated structurally, even though from the outside, it looks fairly simple. Something goes awry, and you notice a problem with the structure, and you point out the problem to your architect. Said architect then asks you what you think should be done about it, and you have the pleasure of learning all about construction to answer, because said architect will do no research for you. Even though that's exactly what they get paid for, and they know more about it than you do. More likely, you get upset and fire the shitty architect. You wouldn't stand for that sort of treatment, yet this is exactly what happens every day with doctors across the country, and it's horrifying. They aren't all like that, but enough of them are for it to be a major problem.

I have gotten little help from doctors on my IBS problems, so of course I looked for any dietary factors that could help, and I hit on beneficial bacteria. Now, I know that probiotic supplementation isn't likely to cure long-term problems, so I went into it expecting little. I used kefir for my probiotics, both milk and water varieties, and cultured my own with grains I bought on amazon for $12. Kefir contains 10+ (actual number varies from one set of grains to the next, depending on what they are fed) strains of bacteria and yeasts per type of culture, and the residents of milk kefir are different from those in water kefir. OTC and Rx probiotics contain 1-5 strains in much smaller quantities, and I'm a cheapskate.

I was surprised. I still have major tummy problems, the gas and bloating are still entirely present, as are the abdominal cramps, but joyously, I have switched sides from IBS-C to IBS-D. Believe me, the latter is easier to deal with. Unfortunately, the problems I have remaining seem to be something like SIBO, although I strongly doubt it's a bacteria overgrowth; more likely it's a candida -yeast- overgrowth, since yeasts produce copious amounts of gasses. I'm not yet entirely certain how to deal with this, but new information comes out about digestive problems rather frequently, so perhaps it won't be long.

In the course of this swap, however, I seem to have lost 13 lbs. I've never, in my life, lost 13 lbs; since the time I started wrestling at about 14 -when I went from 115 lbs and 21% body fat to 119 lbs and 14% body fat- I've been within 4 lbs of 123. I'm reasonably active; I run full-speed up and down the stairs in my house multiple times through the course of my day, lift and shift heavy objects regularly, including 5-gallon buckets of water for my aquariums, etc. I eat mostly healthy, home-cooked food (my partner cooks for me; he's wonderful-I'm not a great cook.) and nothing, as far as I am aware, has changed except how long food stays in my system. Oh, and I cut out some sugar from my diet (by "diet" I mean "coffee"), because holy fuck is that stuff bad for you. Seriously, sugar, in the quantities we consume these days, is toxic. But I don't think cutting a minor amount of sugar from a diet that already contains very little (except I do love my fruit and occasional candy) would have done this.

So now I have a conundrum; If I eat more, I get the pleasure of more frequent pain. If I don't, I may lose too much weight to be healthy.

What would you do, in this position?