NEGATIVE TESTS DO NOT REVEAL THE INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE IN IBS?

“A smoking tailpipe is NOT a ‘smoking gun’!”

The Staff at Oxford, our related laboratories, dietitians, physicians and your fellow IBS patients are all here for one thing: to break the cycle of suffering for you just as we have done for over 15,000 people so far in the USA. One of the most important things we have to understand is all the lab tests in GI tests are negative because there were no tests being done to look at the right thing in the right way [See Section 3 about Stress and IBS]. I won’t even go into “how many colonoscopies have you had to go through” Which SHOWED NOTHING. How many times have you had the same tests and exams AGAIN AND AGAIN and been told, “Everything is normal”?

Everything is NOT NORMAL or you would not be sick. The things they test APPEAR normal because either they are, so the problem is not there, or they did not look close enough. As it turns out after all these millions and millions of colonoscopies and billions of dollars of charges paid by our insurance premiums and copayments, routine colonoscopy for properly diagnosed IBS patients do not turn up any other diseases in IBS patients any more often than if we gave a colonoscopy to EVERYONE right off the street. So should everyone everywhere just get a colonoscopy just in case? They have been simply looking in the wrong place for what causes your IBS symptoms!

For example, let’s say my trusty car begins smoking from the tailpipe. I take it to a mechanic who runs a set of basic diagnostics on the car. They come back with nothing. He then looks up the tailpipe a foot or two. He assumes that since the smoke is coming FROM the tailpipe then the TAILPIPE must be the source of the smoke! However, he sees nothing. That, plus the negative test results means what? Then he charges me $2,000 for the whole exam. To add insult to injury, every mechanic I take my car to does the same thing. They all explain, “Your car has a functional disorder. This is what we call a condition when we cannot find what the cause is. But be happy! The car still runs and it’s not as if the head gasket is going to blow. Now THAT would be trouble! Don’t stress out over it you will only make it worse. In fact we see so many people with smoking tailpipes and nothing is wrong IN the tailpipe we are pretty sure that this is a problem with the car caused by the owners stress causing them to work the car improperly thus overtaxing the car in a way we don’t understand yet!”

Would you keep going back to those mechanics? You would think they were crazy. What if one offered to hypnotize you so you would not see the smoke, or another offered a form of behavioral therapy for your smoking car so you simply could put it into its proper perspective thus not worry about the smoke? HOW FAR would you go with all this before getting the feeling that something is not right here?

That’s an extreme example but that’s pretty much how I felt after 30 years with IBS. Chances are you have had this experience like many of the rest of us. So let’s take a look at why this situation exists. Why is all this experimentation, all this guesswork, all these “empirical treatment trials” (this means, “tell the patient to try this and see what happens”) not helping? First, we are going to have to stray just a little into the world of medical evidence and out of the world of simple analogies to make our point for you. We are going to explain just a little bit of what research from all over the world, compiled over a 40 year period has confirmed about Irritable Bowel Symptoms, and where they come from. It’s really the last 5 years where things have become really clear if you know where to look.

As we said in Section 3, you have to look at special tissue samples from the intestines to see the inflammation of IBS. IBS is actually a “new” subtle form of inflammatory disease of the bowel. This was first proven in 2002 by direct examination (biopsy) of the tissue of the small intestine, where food is “processed”. The discovery has been confirmed many times since yet it is widely ignored in the United States where thinking is stuck on the old ways of looking at IBS. We have even identified the precise inflammatory “chemical mediators” involved in the IBS symptomology. All that remained was to be able to identify what provokes these inflammatory reactions in IBS patients, and then you can rid yourself of the symptoms forever if you avoid whatever causes this inflammatory response to occur.

This method is what our Team developed, patented, and has put into use with doctors and dietitians in the United States in Europe. For each patient the Mediator Release Test (or MRT™ ) is used to develop their own customized LEAP (Lifestyle, Eating and Performance) Program to follow. Basically, avoid what causes this inflammatory response by your immune system and avoid your IBS symptoms. It’s that simple. Here an excerpt from the Swedish research which really turned the corner in IBS studies.

“…we found low-grade infiltration of lymphocytes in the myenteric plexus. Lymphocytes had peri- and intraganglionic location. The mean number of lymphocytes per ganglion ranged from 1.9 to 7.1 per patient, with an overall mean of 3.4. No intraganglionic lymphocytes were found in the control group and only a few periganglionic lymphocytes (mean, 0.2)….Our findings indicate that inflammation and neuronal degeneration in the myenteric plexus are involved in the pathogenesis of IBS.”