You are likely reading this because you suffer from some of the symptoms of UC (ulcerative colitis) and want to find out more. There are many ways to treat colitis, and we hope that this article will give you a sense of what your condition might be and how it may be treated.
Ulcerative colitis is disease of chronic inflammation of the bowels. It is a worldwide disease, but less common in the Asia Pacific and South America.
Ulcerative colitis is a chronic inflammatory disease of unknown cause. The location of the inflammation is in the mucosa of the colon (large intestine). It almost always begins in the rectum and progresses to involve the sigmoid colon, the descending colon, transverse colon and ascending colon, at which point it can be called pancolitis, because the mucosa of the entire large intestine is in a state of inflammation.
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is characterized diarrhea mixed with mucus and blood.
It is often accompanied by tenesmus, which is the urge to defecate without the ability to open the bowels.
Other symptoms include discomfort in the lower abdomen, cramping and urgency to defecate.
Because you are frequently opening the bowels, UC often leaves you tired, fatigued and lethargic. You often will test as anemic with lower than normal level of hemoglobulin.
IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) is the umbrella term for diseases that involve chronic bowel inflammation. Ulcerative Colitis is one type of IBD where the inflammation is confined to the large intestine.
The other type of IBD is called Crohn’s Disease. where the inflammation can be found in any part of the gastrointestinal tract.
Symptoms of IBD include:
Not everyone has all of these symptoms. Some people may have additional symptoms like fever, vomiting and even joint pain.
Below are the main differences in bullet point form:
It does seem that Crohn’s Disease is far more severe than Ulcerative Colitis, although both belong to the umbrella term of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).
If you suffer from Crohn’s, you may experience inflammation in other parts of your body beyond the digestive tract!
In this article, we focus more on the treatment of UC, even though the same principles (and more) would apply to Crohn’s.
While we don’t know the exact cause of UC, dysfunction of the immune system is always involved.
If you have mild ulcerative colitis, you may need minimal or no treatment and remain well for prolonged periods of time. Treatment aims to relieve the symptoms and prevent them returning.
For mild cases, dietary and lifestyle changes, if done well, will be all you need.
For others suffering from more severe Inflammatory Bowel Disease, one or more of the following interventions are often used:
Most people know that steroids are not good for you and want to come of predni but don’t want to come off azathioprine, which is a TNF blocker. In cases where remicade works, then great. But the key is to see how your body responds to the medicine. There are also known side effect of biologics.
Bringing down the inflammation is a very important part of the treatment, especially if your UC is in the active phase. However, it is not just about stopping the inflammation, dousing the fire. We still need to build and regulate and restore function to the body, bringing it into homeostasis.
A house on fire is like being in the acute phase. Once put fire out, why keeping pouring on water (using immunosuppressant) over it? Instead, we should try other ways to help ventilate the house, ensure that the environment around is well-taken care of, ensure that another fire incident does not start again. Diet therapy is a good start, and herbal medicine is very effective for regulating and restoring function to the body.
Even if you have mild ulcerative colitis, diet therapy should be considered. We outline 6 big ideas below to guide your dietary choices.
If you use potatoes, take out the skin. Avoid vegetables from the cruciferous family – this includes broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale, swiss chard and cabbage. No nuts, seeds, beans and lentils.
This means you don’t want your digestive system to be doing more of the processing. You want to make digestion and absorption easier. And for most people, the increased peristalsis resulting from the digestive process often ends up with you going more times to the toilet.
Fruits: This is where the juicer comes in handy, because you are taking out most of the fibers. Applesauce, apricots, grapes, honeydew, peaches and watermelon are well-tolerated. Raisins and dried fruits are a no-no. You may also want to avoid berries, even though they are superfoods.
Vegetables: Juicing your vegetable is a good start. And if you are consuming whole vegetables, then you want to be cooking them until they are tender and easy to digest. Appropriate vegetables to be cooking include carrots, cucumber, lettuce, beet, alfafa sprouts, squash and peppers. Despite beans being a no-no, azuki beans tend to be well-tolerated if cooked long enough.
Grains: This is where it makes more sense to use enriched refined grains as opposed to whole grains in your diet. White rice is preferable to brown rice. Processed pasta or noodles are also good candidates.
Protein Sources: You are not advised to consume beans and lentils. For this reason, selected animal meats are still the best form of protein. You want all your meats cook well-done. The protein sources to choose from are tender white meat, fish and eggs (so long as eggs are not a trigger). No red meats.
Dairy: No dairy, for sure.
Raw food: Raw is out, clearly.
It usually takes some time to figure out what triggers you and to what extent. For example, for most sufferers, alcohol is a trigger, but cocktails are less triggering than red wines. This is likely because red wines contain sulphites.
Cooked white rice or millet made into a porridge is the best way to consume your grains. You can include simple vegetables as laid out above, including azuki beans.
As you improve, you can gradually step up to introduce leafy vegetables and fibers as these fibers are an important source of prebiotics for healing your gut microbiome. Fermented foods like kefir and sauerkraut are also helpful in the recovery stages reduce rates of relapse – they are superfood for gut microbiome.
What you are doing here is to further improve your gut microbiome, which then reduces incidences of relapse.
Yes, those herbs may taste terrible, but you may see results very quickly.
How do you prescribe herbs for Ulcerative Colitis? It really depend on a few factors that we lay down below.
We will then assess your condition and put together a formulation to treat your UC. Give yourself two weeks to evaluate your response to the treatment – it would often be more apparent when your UC is in the active phase.
We will definitely be using herbs that contain antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory compounds. Such compounds are important because one of the key strategies is to bring down the inflammation in the bowels without the use of steroids.
We will also choose certain herbs that help regulate the intestinal mucosa. This is important because it is not just about bringing down the fire; it also is about helping your body find its own footing so that it can regulate the inflammation on its own.
Lastly, we will always include herbs that are suitable to treating how inflammation presents in your body. This is the hallmark of using Chinese herbs to treat disease – we must always treat the person, not the disease.
In the end, the end result is a cessation of inflammation in the body, up to the point where the diarrhea and bleeding stops, appetite increase, there is weight gain and the body remember that it is still in charge.
You will be warming up some liquid herbs that we have pre-brewed for you, and you use an enema set to allow the liquid herbs to enter your colon via your anus. You may feel distended in the intestines if this is the first time doing it.
But the herbs are anti-inflammatory in action and can be very healing. The challenge is in keeping the enema liquids in, and it takes practices to get good at this!
We will be putting needles in your entire abdomen.
We will also choose points on the head, arms and legs to regulate your body. For some patients, we may engage in moxibustion therapy.
