Natural Treatment VS Drug Therapy

I found a balance between both. I don't see a naturopath even though my step mom is one. I always flare when not on any meds at all. The vast majority probably do as well I would say. My step mom says she can help etc etc etc... but at the end of the day she only ever alleviated minor symptoms. Never fixed or cured or got a single one of her patients med free without eventual relapse. That probably holds true as well for all naturopaths.

After 12 years of severe disease (Crohn's-Colitis) I found success with a combined approach on my own. Imuran is the drug I asked for (150 mg/daily) and I added Wild Oregano Oil & Thyme Oil Gel caps (3x daily), Vitamin D and Vitamin A. The combo of all these together over the course of a year brought normal, once a day stool, zero urgency, no blood and no mucus. I combined this with careful diet as well.

On a side note: The reason I am somewhat biased towards naturopaths are many from close personal experience with them (step-mom), but mainly they trash talk pharma and meds yet even they use good old fashioned drugs and they never tell their patients. Antibiotics is an example,as my step mom was recently on them for a skin infection that swelled up. The two other naturopaths at her practice were recently on Prednisone while they were treating and trash talking the pharma industry to their patients..................

Go get some meds, keep up the diet and supplements as they really can't hurt and get on with your life and career symptom free as best as possible. Maybe the combo of meds and natural approach will work for you as well and put your mind at ease on both fronts.

EDIT: I forget why the two were on Pred exactly, but one I know had something with his eye and needed pred long term and the other was something more minor and was most likely a low dose. Does not matter, when naturopaths get sick (for real sick) they go to the normal doc just like everyone else.

Post Edited (Canada Mark) : 3/19/2015 9:53:43 PM (GMT-6)

Hi Emily-

I totally get where you are. I struggled with varying degrees of bowel problems since about the age of 14. By college they were starting to occasionally have a significant impact on my life, and by about age 30, it was getting severe. My first IBD diagnosis was UC, and doctors kept acting annoyed that I was reporting symptoms that didn't fit into the "UC box" (extremely dry eyes & skin problems for example) Finally, a new GI doc decided I probably have Crohns, but we've never confirmed it with a scope. By this time, I was severely ill and the treatment for both diseases was the same options, so I wasn't up for doing a scope just to satisfy a curiosity.

I'll tell you up-front that I ended up on Remicade, and have had nothing but a good experience with it. I'm a mom, I have private music students & I have a second job that I do from home. It was to the point with me that I decided that I was going to do everything I could to enjoy whatever life I was going to have, and if that meant taking a chance with a scary medication, then I was going to give it a try. I am enormously grateful that the chance I took completely paid off, and I really do have my life back.

But before I took the chance on the scary drug, I did everything else I could think of, and a couple things that many IBD patients might not think of. I eat very healthy, take probiotics & exercise regularly (I actually think I had IBD about 5 years before I was diagnosed, but these three things kept me healthy enough over that time period that I didn't have a flare bad enough to see a doctor for over a number of years.) Once it became apparent that I needed something more, I tried Asacol, a "safe" anti-inflammatory medication ("safe" meaning it didn't have a long list of extremely scary possible side effects. Most that were listed were nuisance stuff like nausea, stomach upset, rash, that sort of thing.) Unfortunately, I was allergic to it, so for almost a year I went off of meds and just tried the diet-exercise-probiotic-vitamin supplement thing again.

And then I flared. Bad. Bad like circling the drain bad. And I was terrified to try anything else my doctor was offering. So I tried anti-inflammatory supplements like Cat's Claw & Tumeric (Circumen). I tried low-dose naltrexone. I did a series of FMTs with my husband over about 10 weeks (that helped the most...stool consistency and energy improved, but bleeding just kept getting worse.) And I had to make a decision. Was I going to keep going down this path, knocking myself out to do "everything healthy" when I didn't even have the energy to take a shower, much less prepare a meal? Or was I going to take a chance that there was another medicine out there that could give me my life back? I was afraid of side effects. I was afraid I would have another bad reaction like I already had to three other medications (Asacol is not the only med I'm allergic to.)

I would do it again in a heartbeat. I have my life back, I can do almost anything I want to do now. I have energy to stay awake all day. I can clean my house, I can do my work, I can take care of my family & cook our meals. I can stay awake while driving. I used to do theater and I'm considering auditioning for my first production in over 10 years this spring. Finally, I feel like I can depend on my body to feel good almost all of the time, not just sometimes when I do everything right and am also lucky.

But I'm also not you. Only you know what your priorities are. Do you want to have energy for a career? Do you want to get married and know you'll likely feel well on your wedding day and on your honeymoon? Do you want to have kids? Healthy pregnancies & enough energy to keep up with a toddler? I understand the feeling that "If I just do everything right - eat right, take all my supplements, make sure I exercise enough, make sure I don't have too much stress - I can keep these symptoms under control. But you didn't "do" anything to get IBD and although it is FANTASTIC to do as much healthy stuff as you can to take care of yourself, sometimes it just isn't enough. In my case, regardless of what I did, my body continued to produce too much TNFa, a protein that causes inflammation. When I started using a TNFa inhibitor, my symptoms disappeared. I still eat right, I still take supplements & probiotics, I exercise, I try not to get stressed about the small stuff, and all those things do help the way I feel. But for me, I could be doing all those things and still flaring if I hadn't made the decision to also use the medicine.

I wish you all the best, Emily, and whatever you choose, I hope you find peace with it. Many of the medical options for IBD have a terrifying list of possibly side effects, but remember, the reality of un-checked inflammation is far scarier than most of the things that normally happen on those medicines. And if your naturopath is a good one, she will understand how to integrate her recommendations with any medical interventions your GI doctor provides.