6 Myths About IBD, Debunked

Michelle Pickens’ symptoms escalated in college. At the time, she was throwing up at least once a day, and experiencing frequent nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and constipation. Juggling classes with work at a design studio became an extreme exercise in perseverance. She knew in her gut that something was wrong. Yet three different doctors “wrote it off as stress,” says Pickens, now 32, who lives in Annapolis, Md. Lab work and procedures to see inside her gastrointestinal tract showed nothing abnormal. “No one wanted to dig deeper,” she recalls. In a final act of desperation, Pickens saw yet another doctor, and this one gave her a different kind of test: a pill-sized camera to swallow. It revealed an angry area of inflammation deep within her bowel—a “blind spot” that the colonoscopy and endoscopy hadn’t reached. It was Crohn’s disease.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Crohn’s is one of two types of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a chronic condition that causes the intestinal tract to become swollen and sometimes painful. Crohn’s affects the entire digestive channel from mouth to anus, while ulcerative colitis (UC) impacts the colon, sometimes creating sores along the lining of the large intestine. “The underlying reasons for IBD are still under investigation,” says Dr. Florian Rieder, vice chair of the department of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutritio...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news