Hey Nexians,

crohn's disease is what my wife is suffering from for several years now. Although it's not the worst possible progress of the disease and it's not that bad in her case, like it may look like from reading the wikipedia article, it's still a huge burdon for her some/many-times. And for me it's painful that I can't really do anything to help her.

That's why I'm just making this thread. Does anyone of you have experience with crohn's disease? Has anyone of you found something that helps to ease symptoms?

One thing I want to try is to get her into practicing meditation. This is because the acute symtoms often show when she's stressed over overchallenged by something and I belive that when she can be closer by herself, she could handle stressfull situations better, which would mean less stress which would lead to less symptoms.

But does anyone of you maybe have futher ideas, tht could help? She is already on medication and I can provide more detailed information about it and/or her specific crohn if needed.

Thanks for reading. Have a good day!

Sorry to hear your wife suffers from chron's. I believe cannabis can help by reducing stress in the first place.
A mild indica dosed carefuly via vapourisation or edibles or drinks may help. It is also an anti-inflamattory.

Thanks for your answer! Yeah, you're right about cannabis. Not only that it can help reducing stress. It can also help to reduce symptoms. I belive that our use of cannabis is one of the main reasons, why her progression of the disease is relatively "mild" (sorry, sometimes my vocabulary just isn't big enough to find the right words).

She uses cannabis on a daily base. Me too...

Hello, while I'm not familiar with the disease itself, i found a reference inside a topic I am pretty informed in.

Amino acid-responsive Crohns disease: A case study

Thing is, you would need a doctor who could perform the amino acid essay interpretation like M.Hinz did to try this. It is needed around 3 times to adjust the amino acid levels and then maybe after a few weeks again to see if the equilibrium has been reached.

This are the basics of this method: Relative nutritional deficiencies associated with centrally acting monoamines

This is really a new aproach which isn't obviously in Big Pharmas interest, so don't expect much more research except the one done on this institue.

Giving amino acids and cofactors is compared to conventional medicine harmles and the research is free. You could even try to call the institute where they did the research as they have treated a few thousand patients already.

Also in the documentary in my footnote there is a woman who went to a retreat in the Jungle of Peru but sadly didn't receive remission while 5 out of 8 patients, each with a different diagnosis did.

Awesome! Really great information. This is pretty exciting for me! Thank you so much. I'll have some research to do in the next time!

I hope this really works for your wife, steppa.

If you have any questitions, don't hesitate to ask here or via PM

Thank you so much for this offer! I'll have to read those papers several times to fully understand them. I guess I'll hit you up after this.

Since I went through a similar gastrointestinal illness myself I've digged up a lot of information about this subject.

First of all I would suggest big changes in her diet. Definitely anything that can compromise your wife's gut flora should be removed from the diet. This includes foods containing gluten like wheat and lectins like beans and soy. Polyunsaturated fats should be limited. There is a special diet created for serious gastrointestinal illnesses called GAPS diet ( http://www.gapsdiet.com/ ) where you start with few foods and slowly introduce new ones, so your body can adapt. Sooner or later I would advice moving to updated version of paleo diet more or less modified basing on personal needs of the body. Great source of information on health and diet is this guy: http://chriskresser.com/. Definitely your wife should also populate her gut flora with beneficial bacterias, I suggest making homemade kefir and sauerkraut.

For a quicker and possibly more effective result she might try fecal transplant. I know it sounds very repulsive, but from what I heard it's very safe and really effective. More info on that:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/he...bowel-diseases-1.1445800
http://edition.cnn.com/2...al-transplant/index.html

And of course managing stress is very imporant and meditation is one of the best methods.
Good luck with the healing of your wife!

Thank you shadow! Lots of good information! For the fecal transplant... I've looked into this recently too and from my understanding this helps for deseases which are a result of the lack of certain bactaria. But from _my_ understanding the lack of certain bacteria is more or less a result of an inflammation in the gut in her case. But I'm not sure if I'm entirely right on this.

Thank you all. I knew it would be a good idea to make a thread here. The problem with forums entirely dedicated to crohn's is, that when you read all the bad stuff there it fueles her fears which isn't relly a good thing in regards of stress. I belive it's better not to think about how much worse this could become.

One thing for the diets...

She's also alergic to everything made from sunflower...this includes sunflower oil/fat. On many products the ingridients are not really detailed, i.e. the ingridient list says plant fats. This could be sunflower, palm, anything else or a mix of everything. So she avoids nearly everything which has "plant fats" on the list. You'd be suprised how many things contain those...!

Long story short:

She's angry. She is fed up with having to watch carefully what she eats. And I can totally understnd this. I know that you are completely right about the diet thing...but yeah..it's a difficult situation.

She knows what's good/bad for her. But sometimes she trades the fullfillment of her desire aginst the pain.

Damn...she doesn't deserve this! The more I write about it the angrier I become.

There isn't any consensus on what might really cause crohn's disease. Bacterias in the gut flora regulate immune system, so perhaps in unbalanced microflora immune system is attacking itself or is attacking the dominating bad bacterias. Perhaps it is connected with leaky gut and undigested foods entering too quickly the body and causing allergic reactions. In this case homemade bone broth might be helpful, since it contais a lot of glycine, the most important component of mucous membrane.
Also gut is highly connected with the brain and sometimes it's actually called your second brain. 90% of body's serotonine is located in the gut. That's why stress is a great contributor to the damaging of your gastrointestinal tract.
I know this is a lot of concepts, but they are all interlated and it is important to address them all, if you want to be the most effective.

Here's a great article:
http://chriskresser.com/beyond-paleo-6



The problem with any forum dedicated to any particular chronic disease is that most people quickly become paranoid and this paranoia spreads all over the place. In other words, a physical problem becomes a psychological burden, which is even worse, and everything is self-centered on the disease.

I am writing at the moment a paper about the history of the disease I went through and how it affected my life at different moments. It will take some time, but after I finish I will be glad to share it.

I'm deeply impressed of the ammount of knowledge present in here!

Nexus

That's actually what I advocated, to limit or even avoid all polyunsatured fats ( and those are the fats you find in plants ). She should stick to butter and other animal fats. Coconut oil is also very nice and has antibacterial properties.

I am really sorry for your wife and most of the people don't deserve it, but we live in very shity times in which we have epidemy of lots of different chronic diseases. Just another reason to overthrow the corporate domination and corrupted politicians.

Hehe, yes, sorry...I realised this soon after posting and while reading one of your links. Sorry.

No problem mate, probably too much information at once . It's great that you're doing so much for your wife. Remember that you can always ask me through pm, if you have any concerns.

Crohn's is one of the things I was diagnosed with, most doctors said this or IBS.
From the time I went on solid food I had gut pains almost every day. Sadly I had good medical insurance so I had many doctors and took many drugs and had many X-rays and tests involving drnking radioactive goo and having a garden hose shoved down my throat. It all did no good, none whatsoever.
My last doctor didnt even seem to believe I was in pain, I fired him to his face when I was 18 and decided to not get any more doctors and I started working it out for myself.
Long story short I found out it was 100% dietary. If I ate a piece of chocolate I was assured at least 4 days of agony, possibly more than 8! If I ate preserved/processed meats or more that one egg that was also 4 days of pain. I was raised on junk food, you see, I had never gone much more than 4 days without one of those. Once eliminating every trace of all of those I was rewarded with a cast iron stomach. I can now happily chew down bark and twigs if I want and my gut wont even complain
Take a very close look at diet, and dont make any exception from the scrutiny (not even chocolate) and beyond identity of foodstuffs dont forget to examine ratio of food types. Like ratio of animal protein to vegetable protein. On the inbetween she might try 500 mg pills of PABA to treat attacks, it worked better than any prescription or other OTC med I ever tried for 3-4 hrs of partial relief. Ironically it was a school janitor rather than a doctor who suggested it to me

Intestinal dysbiosis may also play a role. Theres many good vids on youtube for making live kimchee and sauerkraut. These contain probiotics far superior to any probiotic supplement on the market and are quite cheap to make.

I don't have chrons but I have inflammatory bowel disease which is similar..both inflammatory issues in the bowels.

"She's angry. She is fed up with having to watch carefully what she eats."

Sorry to say(cus I know it can suck) but my only relief is by strictly controlling my diet, and this seems to be the case for most people with these kind of inflammatory issues. At some point you just have to get over it and accept it. There are lots of other foods out there

..the best diet for me to be on that eliminated pretty much all my symptoms is something like a primal/paleo diet..I have periods where I eat some organic oats and rice, but no other grains..and I often just don't eat any grains at all for weeks at a time..raw vegetables can also bother me so I tend to steam most of my vegetables other than like a salad..certain legumes really trigger it as well like cashews..

Something like a Weston Price diet seems to help a lot of people as well, and they eat grains..they just make sure to ferment the grains always before they are eaten. Even people who are celiac can eat wheat sourdoe bread when it is properly fermented. There is a lot of stuff out there on this..

I don't do the low carb thing..so don't confuse this with low carb ketogenic paleo diets..I eat as much sweet potatoes and other tubers as I want to..but in general grains, legumes, vegetable oils(high in omega 6) and uncultured pasturized diary all bother me to some degree and cause inflammation. The best grains I have found are oats and rice, or pseudo grains like quinoa. Some beans I can tolerate but certain legumes I just cant eat. You are going to want to eat al grass fed/pastured etc animal foods also, otherwise your generally getting too high a ratio of omega 6 which causes inflammation.

here is a link to a good broth recipe that is very healing for the digestive tract..
http://www.westonaprice....tures/broth-is-beautiful

I know how much it sucks to have to worry about what you eat all the time, and constantly be trying all these weird diets trying to figure out what works..but I also know that it sucks even more to be suffering every day.

Other than that I don't really have much else to offer you. You can look into making bone broths which are extremely healing for the gut tissues, and cultured foods always seem to feel really good inside of me..like high quality aged raw cheese, sourkraut, kombucha etc..animal fats are another food that never causes any issues at all but actually feel soothing on my digestion. I hope she finds some kind of solution that works for her.

Making strong nettle infusions daily is great for inflammation..and it's a good herb to harvest wild in most locations.

Stress will definatly make my symptoms worse..but reducing stress alone does not really fix it in my case..it really is linked heavily to what I eat, and then stress is like a secondary factor. Cannabis is great but it never really solved my problem either.

try low dose naltrexone LDN , i just got this for a friends cousin which has Krohns

also get some GCmaf for at least 8 weeks with high dose of vitD


Grounding is good to restore electrons which play a role in chronic inflammation but thats a long story



well, inform yourself about these suggestions.

"Grounding is good to restore electrons which play a role in chronic inflammation but thats a long story"

I have noticed this also but it sounds too insane to mention to most people.

Is that why some hippie girls love playing in the mud, 'grounding electrons'?
I always simply assumed it was because mud felt good, especially when intoxicated. (try it)

If you really do mean playing in dirt/mud there likely is support for the practice in modern immunological theory. Farmers, poor kids, and others who play in the dirt alot statistically get less auto-immune and hyper-immune problems later in life because their immune system was able to train properly.
If you mean the metaphorical meditation style grounding, thats justified under the modern theory of the dynamics of psychoneuroimmunology. In short, a healthy calm mind plays well with the immune system.

Both might help, but look for the origin of the problem.