Hi Kenvh,
MC has many known causes, and it's certainly possible that your MC may have been caused by a campylobacter infection, because campylobacter infections are very common, infecting over a million people each year. However, it's not true that the immune system of most people has a difficult time controlling a campylobacter infection. Most people completely recover within 2–5 days. If your infection lasted for weeks, your immune system may not have been working correctly. The immune system cannot function properly without adequate vitamin D. Maybe your vitamin D level was too low. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with a much higher risk of developing an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as MC. And IBDs deplete vitamin D levels, so that the immune system cannot heal the body from the damage done by the inflammation associated with the IBD.
Research shows that when the genes that predispose to MC are triggered, the genes that predispose to gluten sensitivity are almost always triggered at the same time (unless they have been previously triggered). Therefore, while it is certainly possible that you might not be sensitive to gluten, it would be very uncommon for an MC patient to not be sensitive to gluten. And when we are sensitive to gluten, that causes increased intestinal permeability, which opens the door to additional food sensitivities.
Many, many MC patients have done what you did — they tried some diet for a few months, and when it didn't stop their symptoms, they mistakenly concluded that the diet doesn't work. Well sure, obviously
that diet didn't work. For one thing, a few months is not enough time to allow the diet to begin healing the gut, and for another thing, we can't use just
any diet. We have to use the one specific diet that totally excludes
all of our personal food sensitivities, even trace amounts. And if the diet we choose to follow misses 1 or 2 of our main food sensitivities, then no matter how long we follow that diet, we will probably never see remission of our symptoms. It's very difficult to treat MC. If it were easy, anyone could do it, and GI specialists would be able to successfully treat most MC patients.
I made the mistake of doing what you did back when I first attempted to treat my symptoms. This was almost 15 years ago, so I didn't have any idea how to treat the disease. I started by cutting gluten out of my diet. Before I started avoiding gluten, nothing made any sense. I seemed to react at random, to anything and everything. But after I had been totally avoiding gluten for a few months, then I could begin to see patterns in the food and reaction journal that I kept, as I experimented with avoiding other foods. But except for gluten (which I continued to totally avoid), I would avoid certain other foods for a few weeks, or a few months, and when I continued to have symptoms, I would make the mistake of adding those foods back into my diet.
After doing this for a year and a half, it dawned on me that if I intended to control my symptoms, I would have to totally avoid every food that had caused me to have a reaction over that year and a half. So I cut out everything that I had found to be suspicious, and within 2 weeks, I was in remission. The point is,
We Have to Avoid Each and Every Food (and all of their derivatives) That Causes Us to Produce Antibodies. Avoiding most of them will not work. And since gluten causes extensive damage to the gut that usually requires a long healing period, we have to avoid gluten long enough for the gut to at least begin to heal. That means that most of us will have to follow our diet for 6 months to a year before we see remission. Kids heal much faster, but it takes adults a long time to heal gut damage caused by inflammation.
I realize that treating this disease can be extremely frustrating, and it's tempting to blame our lack of success on something beyond our control. But the truth is, there are very, very few MC patients who cannot find a diet that either allows them to completely control their symptoms, or at least reduce their symptoms to the point where they can lead a happy, productive life. Most of the people who are unable to control their symptoms by diet changes either are unwilling to follow such a restrictive diet, or they have so many food sensitivities that they cannot avoid all of them, or they are taking a medication that causes their MC, and they are unwilling (or unable) to stop taking that drug.
It's not easy to develop our own personal safe diet, but it can certainly be done, and many hundreds of members here have proven that it can be done. Read the success stories in the
Member Success Stories forum. You will see that initially, many of us doubt that diet is the problem, until we give it a fair chance to work. It's easy to claim that the diet doesn't work, because if we do even one single thing wrong, it will not work. To make the diet work, we have to do
everything right.
And it's not as easy to be dedicated to controlling the disease if we are not extremely sick. I was lucky. I was so sick that I didn't have a choice. I couldn't live that way much longer, so I did what I had to do, and figured out how to control my symptoms by following a very restrictive diet. And the diet continues to work just fine for me. It can work for you too, if you will do it right, and give it a fair chance.
If you haven't checked your vitamin D level lately, I would highly recommend making sure that it is well up in the middle of the so-called "normal" range, because
without adequate vitamin D, our immune system cannot operate normally, and it can make mistakes.
Tex