healthy person wrote:
While you're doing that, I would have a good enema every night for about a week before sleeping, then gradually taper them off to a couple times a week, once a week, then periodically whenever you feel the need for one.
My sympathies to anyone who would take a daily enema based on advice on the internet.
GI issues wrote:
Mucus and blood in stool
Pics?
Darkwave wrote:
healthy person wrote:While you're doing that, I would have a good enema every night for about a week before sleeping, then gradually taper them off to a couple times a week, once a week, then periodically whenever you feel the need for one.
My sympathies to anyone who would take a daily enema based on advice on the internet.
Yeah it's much better to take medications and have your insides cut out.
If you're healthy, neither enemas nor meds/"cutting out" of insides are advisable. But, several months of bloody stools = not normal. I hope for the OP that this is not crohns/ulcerative colitis, but as others have alluded to- it is among the leading candidates.
I'd also hope you (here's good advice for you) never get either of these diseases- they can be pretty terrible. But, if you ever do get so unlucky, you'll be so thankful that there are a multitude of increasingly effective medications.
It's very easy to sneer at medications/surgery when you are healthy, and need neither. And, to be fair, some in the medical profession have complicated things by over-diagnosing, over-treating, and over-categorizing things as "diseases", which certainly erodes trust.
Many of us are trying to push back against this by doing research into the harms of excessive medical care (whether it be unnecessary statins, unnecessary antibiotics, or unnecessary prostate biopsies- to name a few). One of the leading medical journals (Archives of Internal Medicine) has a very nice series entitled "less is more"- devoted to research that points out the costs and harms associated with over-zealous doctoring (one of my papers under review there currently).
Ultimately, the elephant in the room here (and what drives a lot of the distrust like that seen here) is that the majority of physicians are paid under a fee-for-service plan- i.e., do more, get paid more. And that is of course a powerful driver to do more. Hopefully, that will change, but there will be powerful push-back from the specialties that "do" more (compared to specialties that just think). I personally love being in a salaried system- I get the same pay whether I see 5 patients in a morning's clinic, or 10. So, I find myself often telling patients to not see me for follow-up, to just give a call if there are unanticipated problems. Would I do this if it hurt my bottom line? Or would I tell them that "well, as long as you're on this antibiotic, I should see you every month". These are the insidious ways the current payment method drives up the cost of care, and erodes trust.
dd wrote:
Ultimately, the elephant in the room here (and what drives a lot of the distrust like that seen here) is that the majority of physicians are paid under a fee-for-service plan- i.e., do more, get paid more. And that is of course a powerful driver to do more. Hopefully, that will change, but there will be powerful push-back from the specialties that "do" more (compared to specialties that just think)
Interesting -- I always attributed the "do more" pressure to the threat of litigation -- the fear that if you don't order a test or prescribe a med, you might be on the hook down the line if things go wrong for the patient.
An oft-cited (and just as often, debunked) reason for high health care costs. Were it true, then we would have states like Texas being leaders in unnecessary care, since they have the strongest caps on damages in medical malpractice suits. In reality, they are among the worst states in terms of excessive care.
Most estimates of nation-wide medical malpractice reform cite a reduction in national health spending of 0.5%. With healthcare costs taking up 18% of GDP, shrinking that by 1/2 a percent gets us to 17.91% of GDP. Granted, that's a lot of money, and any savings is better than no savings, but it's not what is driving the system into the ground, financially. That's the every-day behavior of docs and patients, and the flurry of spending that happens towards the end of life.
Darkwave wrote:
Interesting -- I always attributed the "do more" pressure to the threat of litigation -- the fear that if you don't order a test or prescribe a med, you might be on the hook down the line if things go wrong for the patient.
It's because we like to screw people for as much as we can.