بسم الله الرحمن اللرحيم
Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Crohn's Disease, Colitis etc. Alternative Treatment.
This treatment is spearheaded by Professor John Hunter: http://www.crohns.org.uk/
Professor John Hunter is a Consultant Physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, visiting Professor of Medicine at the University of Cranfield and a recognised authority on diseases of the gut including Crohn's Disease, Colitis and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
The normal treatment offered for people with inflammatory bowel disease is medication consisting of anti-inflammatory drugs, immunosuppressant drugs, steroids, and eventually surgery when the drugs stop taking effect. The drugs aim to suppress the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, but do nothing for the illness itself, and of course they come with the additional side effects which bring about a whole host of different illnesses.
Professor John Hunter advocates a treatment completely devoid of drugs, which only consists of drastic dietary changes in the initial stages and in the later stages the dietary changes are somewhat relaxed.
The treatment is labelled as an elemental diet. This is a liquid diet which consists of all the nutrients a person needs, but which are broken down to their most basic elements so the digestive system of the patient is not required to do any work, and as the diet is elemental and liquid based it is very easily and quickly absorbed by the body. www.crohns.org.uk/crohns_disease/nutritional_therapy/whic...
Quote:
This crucial first stage of dietary treatment appears to be essential for success. Special liquid diets are the best treatment for Crohn’s disease (CD) currently known; in our experience 85-100% of patients will enjoy a full remission. This is considerably better than pharmacological treatments such as corticosteroids or Infliximab. Most (95%) people drink the liquid diets but some prefer administration by a fine tube through the nose into the stomach.
The current medical theory is that there is an imbalance in the gut of the patient which prompts the immune system to become activated in that area and thus causing an inflammation as it gets to work to correct that imbalance. The imbalance is created by bad gut bacteria reacting with a fungi in the gut. The immune system tries to address this by attacking the location of the imbalance which is the gut.
The elemental diet initially aims to starve the bad bacteria by not allowing or limiting any food source reaching the bad bacteria. Once the elemental diet is complete and the patient is in remission then prebiotic, probiotics, and beneficial food is slowly introduced. This has been labelled as The LOFFLEX Diet. www.crohns.org.uk/crohns_disease/nutritional_therapy/the-...
From my understanding, someone who is prone to inflammatory bowel disease will be prone to it all their lives due to the way their body is balanced. For this reason they will need to completely avoid processed foods and drinks, certain trigger foods specific to them that bring about the illness, and also limit other foods such as animal proteins and fat, certain fibres, food containing gluten, sugars... Other factors that need to be addressed are lack of vitamin D, additives in drinking water (flouride, chlorine, chloramine), lack of exercise, and stress. So basically eat and live according to the sunnah.
