EXTRA DIMENSIONS

Over the years I have learned the hard way about some of the in’s and out’s of Crohn’s. A negative experience can have a positive benefit if you have your eyes open. Because I started to be able to see into the problem, I got major-league improvements.

I had been thinking that if I ever found someone who had Crohn’s I would try to share my knowledge with them so they could make major league improvements of their own. Then the other day the obvious occurred to me: why not join the Internet Age and put my info on the Web? That’s the purpose of this blog.

DEPT. OF SADNESS AND WOE
I was 19 years old, cruising through my first few years of college when Crohn’s jumped up and bit me. It wiped me out. I had a 3.94 GPA and had to drop out of school. This alone changed my life.

My parents sent me to a top GI guy, I got diagnosed, and he started me on a bunch of pills, including prednisone.

TOM STRIKES BACK
I was a rebellious kid, always in trouble with all the authorities. I look back with regret that I was so adversarial. My dad said I would argue with a sign post. But it paid off big-time in one way.

I went to the Library and looked up my meds in the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR). The contraindications –read “problems”- for prednisone were a whole column long. There must have been 50 bad outcomes listed. They got worse and worse as I read down the column. I can still remember the last two: “permanent psychosis or death”.

Well, for this rebellious kid, that was enough. I thought I would rather have the disease than the side effects. So I killed the meds before they could kill me. While I regret my youthful rebelliousness in general, I have always been happy I made that decision. *

CRAZY ABOUT CROHN’S
In those days -1969- it was thought that there was a psychological component to Crohn’s. Today those views have fallen out of favor, but I think there may be something to it. One psychological trait I remember was a lack of independence. That one sure fit me. I was certainly not ready for the world at 19, yet I was having to try to make it on my own. For sure that was one of the biggie stressors I had going on.

Part of the standard regimen in those days was to send the victim to a head-shrinker to straighten out his psycho problems. I went, I saw, I shook my head in disbelief. I thought these guys were the biggest crock I had ever encountered. So I dumped them the same way as I dumped the prednisone.

CROHN’S PSYCHOLOGY
But just because the big-shot pros were a bunch of Bozos, don’t ignore psychological influences as one of the wholistic components. We are multi-dimensional, so our physical ailments have physical, psychological, spiritual, chemical, dietary, mental, energy, etc. components. There is a lot of overlap and interlinking, so it’s hard to comb out one pure component and separate it from the others.

A 2009 undergraduate study by Joshua Paulton at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada demonstrated an interesting feedback loop that causes Crohn’s symptoms to worsen. http://members.shaw.ca/jpaulton/index.html

He showed that the anxiety and helplessness a patient might be experiencing about his symptoms would actually make the symptoms worse. That makes sense to me since I believe anxiety and helplessness are some of the psychological components associated with the disease in the first place.

CONTROL SYSTEM THEORY 101
Any dynamic control system, like the cruise control in your car, or a home heating / AC system, or your own digestive system, can “go off the deep end” and slam into a control lock either all the way on or all the way off. System feedback prevents this in the car and AC systems. For the patient with a whacked out digestive system, Control Systems Theory would instruct us to add negative feedback, i.e. add in the opposite of whatever the excessive trend is. That’s how to break the vicious cycle.

In Paulton’s study, where a patient gets worse because of a perception of helplessness that he is getting worse, negative feedback added to the system might be the hope that prayer will bring a reversal, or that an alkaline diet will turn it around. Who knows, maybe symptoms can be reversed by a hypnotic suggestion that the symptoms are reversing.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY
All effects have causes, including your symptoms. Stay tuned for future posts. We’ll be exploring some ways to re-balance your feedback loop and restore equilibrium to your whacked out digestive system. I promise.

Tom

• I made one big goof, though. I didn’t taper off the prednisone like you should. Instead, I quit overnight. Real Bad Idea. If you decide to quit any of your meds, MAKE SURE you do it with the proper supervision!!

Copyright Tom Carroll 2010