Researchers at the Boston Medical Center would like your help. They are doing an online study to learn whether writing about IBS symptoms and experiences can actually affect the symptoms themselves – an interesting topic for someone who runs a site called IBS Tales!
They are offering $25 for everyone who completes the full study. All you need to do is write for 30 minutes a day for either one day or four consecutive days, and complete three or four sets of questionnaires over a three-month period.
You need to be a US resident between the ages of 18 and 65 to take part, and you must have been diagnosed with IBS by a physician. Your information will be kept confidential and will only be accessible to the staff in the Office of Clinical Research at Boston University Medical Center.
To participate just go to http://www.bmc.org/ibs
Librax works very well for me.
Please publish this in case it can help others… I hop eit is not too long but please edit it appropriately if it needs to be shorter…
I was encouraged to see so many being so open with their experiences.
I am a 65 year old Scottish male who was diagnosed with IBS at the age of 25. Since then I have tried nearly all treatments from hypnotherapy (helped a little and still does) to codeine phosphate. I was an international business developer so I traveled the world and my IBS has caused me misery a lot of the time in most “corners” of the world!.
As is sometimes recommended a food diary can be useful. I added a ‘wellness’ figure each day along with the number of loo visits (with stool ratings 0-10, 0 being incontinence) and food of course. Unfortunately the only usefulness I found in such diaries was in reporting my distress to the medical practitioners – that is to the very few who had more than a few minutes to understand their patient. As has already been written, their is little real appreciation of IBS in the medical profession simply because “IBS” is a catch-all condition – I prefer to call it UBS as in Unknown Bowel Syndrome.
Anyway, back to codeine – this was a recommendation by my sister who -unknown to me – was also a long term sufferer of “UBS”. She had been prescribed codeine phosphate and it had changed her life. So about 4 years ago I suggested to my doctor that perhaps codeine might help… it did, in fact I got my life back after 40 years!
I consider myself fortunate as I only need 1x30mg tablet per day, sometimes 2 if I eat several large meals in a day. I am wary and I’m hoping that this dosage will not make me dependent. Of course I still try the ‘latest’ cures but codeine is my trusty friend now and I don’t go anyway without a couple in my wallet!
By the way, the latest ‘cure’ I tried was a 3 point diet – no dairy products, no drinking during meals along with special probiotics that had been carefully selected (at a cost of course!). I tried this for 4 months without the special probiotics and got slimmer but it didn’t cure the “UBS”. Maybe that was my fault for not spending the $1,000s the ‘cure’ demanded!
A question that has always eluded me was ‘why’ did I ‘catch’ UBS? Up to the age of 22 I did not have it.
However, after a 3 year period in Norway I seem to have ‘caught’ it because that was my earliest memory of being caught! I remember it well – I was hurrying home from the bus (for obvious reasons) and within about 100 yards I stopped as I could no longer control myself – as I stopped – I looked into the window beside me and saw a child looking out at me – seeing me in my distress! I wonder what she thought – probably just that crazy Scotsman on his way home! Anyway, as I think back to that period of my life it coincided with me having serious dental treatment with a lot of penicillin. So my belief is that abuse of penicillin at that time killed off key digestive enzymes that help the stomach digest food and that resulted in my “UBS”.
Hopefully this wee summary will help someone struggling with the symptoms.
Paid clinical trials are a great way to seek relief, currently we are trying to help sufferer’s in the area of IBS. Thanks for the post and I hope you visit our site.
Chris
What a great site, my wife has IBS, and has had it for years, she has upper right side pain that never goes away. She has been in constent pain for 4 months now. She says I suffer from IBS-W(wife) pain.HA! this site has helped me help her.
My prayers are with you all who suffer, and I mean that.