Visit with GI This Morning

[MBombardier]

My visit with my GI went well. I told him why I was not taking the Apriso, and he diagnosed me with non-celiac gluten intolerance, and was very pleased that I am doing so well with GF and the low residue diet.

I cut it to a couple of PubMed articles about the genetic connection between MC and celiac, and highlighted the most pertinent sentence on each one. He was very interested, and surprised that he had missed it. He said that my insurance would not pay for a blood test for genes because it would not change the treatment. He thinks he may know Dr. Fine, and said that what Dr. Fine is doing is something he's always wanted to do.

I asked him how many MC patients he has and he said about 20. He said that he has one patient who is a drug addict. This patient will take a bunch of NSAIDS so he can end up in the hospital and get drugged up. Evidently this is a young man because his father has him in drug rehab now. How sad.

I also told him about colonoscopy prep perhaps causing a flare, and he was interested in that. He said that the old Fleet enemas were really bad at causing flares, but he was surprised that the polyethylene glycol would. He thought maybe the magnesium citrate would be more the culprit.

We had a really good conversation, and during the course of it he actually admitted that GIs really don't know how to treat MC right now. He told me I was up for another colonoscopy in 2015, since I had the adenoma, and I did not remind him that last October he had told me that my MC earned me a colonoscopy in three years.

Oh--we also talked about my colon being unusually twisted, and he said that was a marker for IBS. Interesting, huh? He said he often will take a photo of the twisted part, but we looked at my pictures and he had not taken one of me.

So all in all--a very good visit! Thank you all again for your helping me figure out what information to take in to show him!!

[tex]

and he diagnosed me with non-celiac gluten intolerance, and was very pleased that I am doing so well with GF and the low residue diet.

Wow! Good for him, and good for you. That really went well.

Thanks for sharing the report. That's really encouraging.

Tex

[Polly]

Hi Marliss,

An enlightened and open-minded MC patient having a discussion with an enlightened and open-minded GI doc.......it doesn't get much better than that!

I found it striking that he has 20 MC patients. It is certainly being diagnosed more - hopefully the researchers will take note of this fact and want learn more about it.

Love,

Polly

[Zizzle]

Wow, that sounds like a great visit with great, mutually respectful interaction. That doc is a keeper!!

[Celie]

Hi Marliss,
I am glad you had a good meeting. Good docs are a treasure!

Celie

[Gloria]

It sounds like you had a meeting of the minds. What a great experience! I wonder how much GIs collaborate with each other? If we could only get them to share success stories and experiences...

Gloria

[MaggieRedwings]

Morning Marliss,

Can we PLEASE clone him? It would be great if we could all have a GI so open minded and willing to listen.

Congrats on the great appointment.

Love, Maggie

[hoosier1]

Marliss,

I have a redundant colon too. And I think it is really twisted. In fact, I am wanting to have some of it resected. I think it is causing some of my functional problems. A discussion for my doctor in two weeks. He tells me it is full of risks, well, so is my current pain and dysfunction.

Rich

[MBombardier]

It seems to me that it would increase the chance for infection, too. My mother's best friend died of a bowel infection.

[tex]

During my first colon surgery, one of the staples didn't hold correctly, so I had some leakage, and they had to wash out my abdominal cavity, and flood me with antibiotics, etc. I had some infection problems initially, but luckily, the antibiotics, (and my immune system), did the job, and I recovered without any serious issues. I consider it somewhat of a miracle, though, that I got off that easily. I wouldn't want to go through one of those surgeries if I were taking any type of immune system suppressant. That's for sure.

Tex

[JLH]

Marliss, would you please post the links to the articles you took to your doctor. My DD#1 has a gluten intolerance gene and a Celiac gene.

No one in DH's family that we know of has Celiac but my husband's sister's son has Crohn's. His mother didn't even know about it. DD#2 had told me and I asked S-I-L. That's how she found out about it.

[MBombardier]

Hi Joan!

The ones I ended up taking in were:

High prevalence of celiac sprue-like HLA-DQ genes and enteropathy in patients with the microscopic colitis syndrome
http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/v95/n ... 0504a.html

Collagenous colitis as the presenting feature of biopsy-defined celiac disease
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15319648

Another good one is:

An association between microscopic colitis and celiac disease
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19631283

Hope this helps!