Controlling crohns naturally

I saw from another thread it's your son who has Crohn's and not you. I don't know how old he is, but this is my advice for whatever it's worth.

Forget about controlling Crohn's "naturally", particularly if your son is a child. It's hard enough to control Crohn's the "unnnatural" way, let alone any other way. Please forget about homeopathy: Crohn's is a real disease and thus won't be subject to any placebo effect, at least not to any degree remotely sufficient to control inflammation.

That said, for children/teenagers with Crohn's disease, there is decent evident that enteral nutrition can induce remission. The drawback is that it doesn't last, and liquid only diets are way too unpleasant and restrictive to sustain long-term. The advantage is that you can avoid taking courses of steroids this way. Steroids stunt growth in children, so it's imperative that they go on steroids as infrequently as possible.

For adults with Crohn's, diets can help with symptom control, but controlling symptoms isn't the same thing as controlling the underlying inflammation which drives Crohn's. If your son is willing, he can look into the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet). If he does try such a diet, my advice would be for him to continue to have regular checkups. Folks on strict diets can be resistant to having checkups, but it's crucial to know whether there is inflammation or not - letting untreated inflammation go for months or years is a bad idea.

Yes, I do. I'm 41, diagnosed 16 years ago, one resection 16 years ago. It's different for everyone though.

Hello,

I haven't been here for a long time. In 2000 I went on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet ( SCD). It was a miracle for me. I had Crohn's disease since I was a child. I had emergency surgery for a blockage and had my ileum removed at age 15. I continued on medication and remained sick all my life. After the birth of my third child I developed my third rectal fistula/abscess. I was so sick and my rectum area was so narrowed I would sometimes vomit because stool could not come out. I had several surgeries on my abscess but it would form new pockets. I was so thin and sick and could barely get out of bed. It was awful. All while trying to nurse a baby and with 2 other children 4 and 2. The doctor told me I could not go on this way and told me I needed to have my rectum removed and have a colostomy. That is when I searched the internet for alternative answers. I used to work as an RN so I knew what a colostomy was like and I did not want one. The SCD was pretty new on the internet then, but it made sense to me. I never thought I could do it, but with the strength of Jesus, I did. It was overwhelming but it was my only Hope.

Within 6 months everything completely healed. My colo-rectal surgeon and GI were amazed because the healing was quite dramatic and evident. My rear end had been an inflamed mess and now there was no evidence of the disease symptoms. I went off my medication 3 months into the diet because I figured I had gotten so sick on it, it didn't make sense to stay on it since I was feeling so much better.

That was 15 years ago. I remained perfectly fine with no medication.even with strictures in my rectum until 2 years ago when I stupidly cheated and ate potato chips 3 days in a row. I didn't feel sick at all, other than I became constipated and I think I must have gotten some low grade inflammation in the stricture area. I still don't get cramps, but I do struggle with what I think are a couple of old strictures in my rectum and sigmoid area which sometimes makes defecation difficult. I went back to my colo-rectal surgeon and he said the stricture was nice and soft, not hard like others and he dialated it. He said there is no sign of the disease.

So I would absolutely say try the diet. You have nothing to lose. The one caveat is you do have to do it 100 percent. Absolutely no cheating. I am so sorry I cheated. It was just not worth it. I stayed 100 percent on the diet for 3 years and even after that only cheated a very tiny bit like with cream in my coffee.

Last December I met a woman at a college visit who happened to have a daughter with Crohn's who was on tube feedings because she wasn't growing properly and couldn't gain weight. I convinced her to try the SCD. They took a leap of faith and went off the tube feedings and replaced them with high fat homemade SCD yogurt shakes and other food. 4 or 5 months later she was gaining weight and all her inflammation markers came back normal. They were amazed. I have helped quite a few other people who have gotten well also. It works very well for Crohn's disease.

A good website to help, especially if it is a child, is www.pecanbread.com. Also if you go to www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info you can find out more.

Drugs just treat the symptoms, while the diet gets to the root problem of the disease which I believe is pathogenic bacteria that you have to starve out. Some people can introduce regular food with time. I could cheat a little for a long time after I was well for several years, like with a salad dressing at a restaurant. Some have to stay on the diet. It depends.
I think the diet keeps the bacteria in check, but they can rebound.

If you have any questions feel free to email me: [email protected]

Katie

Post Edited (KatieF) : 10/17/2016 12:53:46 PM (GMT-6)

Hello,
Well of course that is your choice. I may not be "cured" as I can't eat grains or sugar, but there is no sign of inflammation and my abscess/fistula they said would never heal as it was too diseased, healed. No more endless cramping in the bathroom, no more endless fatigue etc. etc. The problem with the drugs is that they work by depressing the immune system, while I believe your immune system actually needs to be stronger to fight off the pathogenic bacteria.

The SCD has so many good things to eat I don't feel deprived. Yes it takes work but good health is well worth it to me. When I go to restaurants I have a salad with salmon or something else. It isn't that big a deal. I hated going to the doctors always wondering what they would do to me and I never got much better, maybe temporarily felt better, but the disease just progressed. And I hated spending hours in the bathroom and being fearful of doing anything without a bathroom near by. I was a slave to the disease.

I eat things I never would have dreamed of eating before such as nuts and raspberries and seeds. I make muffins with almond flour and honey, and cakes and cookies too. Paleo is so similar to SCD there are a million recipes out there now. So much more than when I started. So I encourage anyone who has the disease to try the diet for 3 months and see what happens. No, it isn't easy to change the way you eat, but anything worth while isn't easy. Many people agree with you, they don't want to change the way they eat. Probably the majority, actually. But there are quite a few who do.

When considering the SCD, Crohn's patients may want to take into consideration the higher risk for oxalate kidney stones since almond flour is high in oxalates. I know I have been advised to be careful of oxalate-containing foods in my diet.

http://www.ccfa.org/resources/kidney-disorders.html

Post Edited (JaSanne) : 10/17/2016 8:13:22 PM (GMT-6)

Kathy wasn't trying to sell you on anything nicecupoftea. She was answering the original peeps question. You are the one who got all uppity.

NiceCupOfTea said...
I had already confessed to being irritated, but sterling work there, Sherlock.

NCOT, be respectful. You do this too many times on this forum. You're not contributing to these kinds of discussions; and after a time, you're attacking people who want to help others, people who share their experiences, their knowledge. You act immaturely.

You're damaging the forum's basic reason of existence: helping each other in a respectful way with good intentions.

Know your boundaries.

xy123, you really shouldn't be telling anyone else that they aren't contributing and to know their boundaries. Frankly some of these "natural" treatments can be downright dangerous. Going off of medications and not listening to your doctors can actually be deadly for us. So if you want to talk about boundaries, I think people need to be careful telling people to do just that for treatments that really don't have any hard evidence that they actually work. As people say, you have nothing to lose trying them. Really? Oh I don't know, untreated Crohn's for me would mean expensive hospital stays, complications, surgery etc...

It's one thing to recommend something that you feel works. It's another to spout off things that aren't factual. Also there is NOTHING wrong with pointing out the downside to these diets. Just as many will gladly point out the downsides to medication. These diets are strict, hard to follow and hard to stay on. They require a lot of prep work, from people who are already fatigued. It can take a very long time to see any results, if they actually work. Because they don't work for everyone. Personally I'd want to know all sides of the coin before jumping off and trying any treatment.

How old is your son? Treatment for children needs to be more aggressive than adults so I would be very careful trying to manage him with diet alone.

@soynomore the drugs allow your body to heal itself rather than continue to kill itself.

Still on this bloody tablet unfortunately. Anyway, I have found an abundance of studies on IBD and mucosal healing. Here's three of them.

- www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1590865813002491

- www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1590865813002247

The third link explains, in great detail, how mucosal healing works and how knowledge of this might lead to new treatment options in IBD.

- www.nature.com/mi/journal/v7/n1/full/mi201373a.html

Basically there is loads of evidence that meds lead to mucosal healing compared to placebo controls.

However healing takes place on medication, it's indisputable that it happens. The only med which has an association with poor mucosal healing is the med people love to hate: pred. I can testify to the latter from personal experience. I was on pred for months before my first surgery. It controlled my symptoms well enough, but after my colon was removed, the pathology showed that the entire colon was severely diseased - I was a bit shocked by that, as I think I had expected it to be partially healed at least. But it wasn't.

In a nutshell, meds are more than just symptom suppressors: they do actually treat the inflammation caused by IBD. There are times when they don't work, or stop working, but that's another issue. When they do work, they're a hell of a lot better than being on nothing.