steroid-free, statistics, stool report

This week we've finished the tapering of prednisolone and now for medications Isaac has only his teaspoon of sulfasalazine three times a day, compounded in a goldenrod liquid form. If he eats any soy product, he'll have loose diarrhea the next bowel movement. If he drinks milk or consumes a lot of cheese, his stool seems to get softer--maybe not the next stool but at least the following one. He seems to do well otherwise, although currently his diet is mostly vegan and vegetarian.

We are getting more interested in the number of young children with IBD who also were exposed to antibiotics at a tender young age. For the science, however, we also want to see how many total children are exposed to antibiotics at a tender young age. Then compare the statistics and see if we have some significant correlation. Even if there is, it would be good then to see if we can determine a cause of IBD to be an imbalance of bacterial and microbial development in the digestive system. Perhaps if the genes are right, this imbalance can trigger IBD. Perhaps even if the genes are not right, this imbalance alone can cause IBD. It seems that when the immune system is reset, IBD is curable. As far as we can tell from testimonies, it seems that healing has taken place when somebody with IBD is able to heal themselves with juiced whole foods and diet change and/or probiotics. It's hard to gather stats for people who have a slight (or significant) run-in with IBD, but then heal completely. Because if someone heals completely, s/he isn't going to be counted in any sort of statistic set of IBD patients. S/He is just a normal person who is not going to be seeing the doctor about her/his condition. Moreover, the condition is probably retrospectively not going to be seen as IBD, which goes down as a mysterious chronic disease and not something that spontaneously resolves. I think I'm going to make some library trips and read up on the literature out there and see what more we can learn.

I think Bonnie wasn't thinking the other day when at the museum, she got some McDonalds for a lunch for the boys. They had chicken nuggets and french fries, but sure enough, we saw a loose liquidy stool yesterday (Actually the second stool of the day. The first one started fine but ended loose). It's unnerving because we don't want him to have another flare-up and it's this sort of thing that can induce one. We generally keep up on his poop in order to monitor this sort of stuff and also see how different foods affect him. For example, today we're going easy on fiber in order to not overwork his system. We'll see what we're looking at next before we go to the level of doctor notification....