Our Unique Approach to IBS
BY: DR. MELINA ROBERTS
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a common digestive problem affecting many Canadians. Canada actually has the highest rates of IBS in the world with five million Canadians suffering from IBS. IBS symptoms involves abdominal pain, irregular bowel habits, alternating constipation and diarrhea, gas, and bloating.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a diagnosis of exclusion. It means that you donT have anything pathologically wrong with your digestive tract but based on your symptoms you do have something functionally wrong.
Initially when I started treating IBS in my practice I would change up people’s diet to reduce the inflammation in their gut and give them supplements that would help to heal the mucous membranes of the digestive tract. With this approach alone I would have about 60% of my patient’s experience a significant improvement within 3 months of following my protocol. That statistic is significantly better than any IBS treatment plan through the conventional system. This plan is what I’d call “the school medicine approach” as this is an approach that is taught in the naturopathic medical schools.
As I started doing more and more vitamin IV therapy in my practice, I started implementing IVs in my IBS program. The vitamin IV therapy allows us to bypass the compromised digestive tract, to ensure the absorption of certain nutrients and stimulate more rapid healing in the body. The inclusion of this therapy marginally increased my success rates to 65%. It was a marginal improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.
Later, I started taking courses in Visceral Manipulation, which is a manual therapy that releases adhesions in the body caused by inflammation. With normal function the organs are able to be freely mobile and slip and slide on each other. Visceral Manipulation releases the physical restrictions and allows the organs to move freely, hence function optimally. With the addition of this therapy to my IBS program, I found that my success rates in treating IBS improved to close to 75%. At this point, I was now gaining a reputation as an IBS specialist and seeing many more people with IBS within my practice.
The next step for me is ensuring that patients maintain long term health is to identify the causes of inflammation and remove any of the stressor whether they are physical, biochemical or emotional. I developed a therapy called Neuro-Viscero Regulation therapy that allows me to identify and remove the causes of regulatory disturbances in the body. This means I’m able to identify what is causing the inflammation and remove the causes. The cause of inflammation can be food intolerances, immune challenges, heavy metals, environmental toxins, emotional conflicts and anything physical such as structural imbalances, surgeries, or scar tissue. With the addition of this therapy into the IBS program, the success rates improved to close to 90%.
This is the progression of how I developed my unique approach to treating IBS, which has helped many patients experience an incredible gut rejuvenation.