Roadtrips & Snack Plans

First, the poop scoop:

Isaac's stool has continued to be pass inspection since our last post. These are not ideal stools, but no blood, and we're continuing to be hopeful that we are on the cusp of a good remission. Yesterday he had some snacks with soy, and we didn't have any problems last night. He even passed a #6 stool this morning that didn't seem problematic, so that seemed good.

Also, we have ventured on a roadtrip and a weekend "away", and we are pleased to report that it was a success. We have a new procedure on the books. And I don't mean medical procedure, good heavens, but rather, a

Procedure for Social Snacking

When a group of ten kiddos get Easter cupcakes, for example, and you don't know if the ingredients pass stringent criteria, and your little boy is part of that group, it is really difficult to say, "No, you can't have one," unless you have a plan. And so now our plan is going to include some sort of snack bag which we'll have with us at all time so that we can make a suitable substitute snack that Isaac will enjoy will everybody else is enjoying an Easter cupcake.

IBD around the world

I got curious about the incidence of IBD in various countries. Immediately google delivered:

abstracts of a few journal articles about IBD in various countries

Here it looks like as you can expect. Lots of mystery and different conclusions where IBD appears and even how it appears. Overall it looks like a disease of affluence which is impacted at least as much by environmental factors (like diet) as genetics.

One of the obvious problems, however, is the idea that many IBD patients can go a lifetime without medical treatment or diagnosis. And since it is a personal and sort of taboo matter, and since nobody really wants to be probed, I imagine it tends to be under-represented in studies. In order to get more statistics, I'd love to be in charge of large broad-based survey studies of adults with ulcers, asthma, allergies, arthritis, and various GI pathologies, asking questions such as "Can you verify if you had excessive diarrhea as a toddler? Bloody stool ever?" and so on.

Then, continuing systematically, we want a giant spreadsheet of patients organizable by symptoms, indications, diagnoses, ages, gender, family history, treatments that work, treatments that don't work, allergies, and you name it. And then we try to sift out various types of IBD and see what patterns we can find. Or even if we do some statistical analysis on the hundreds of thousands of US patients. Am I too impatient here to think that at least we can gather up patients who react/don't react similarly, and see if we can get to some physiological tendencies/causes?

I know bright scientific minds are on this, but now that it has hit home so closely, I want to be closer to the cutting edge of research I guess.