Natural Treatment for Ulcerative Colitis

If you have been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, natural medicine can help you. We offer safe and effective holistic treatment, using non-toxic and non-invasive therapies such as targeted dietary changes, herbs and nutritional supplements, which will alleviate the symptoms of ulcerative colitis and reduce the chance for recurrence.

What is Ulcerative Colitis? Symptoms and Diagnosis

Ulcerative colitis is a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In ulcerative colitis, sections of the large intestine or sometimes the entire colon become inflamed. Symptoms of ulcerative colitis include diarrhea with blood and/or mucus, and pain and cramping in the abdomen. People with ulcerative colitis often must have more than 10 bowel movements per day and may also experience fever, weight loss and hemorrhoids or anal fissures. In addition to these general symptoms, people who suffer from ulcerative colitis can experience a wide variety of symptoms outside their digestive tract. These can include arthritis, skin lesions and liver disease. Ulcerative colitis symptoms are intermittent, meaning they regularly improve and then return again after symptom-free periods of time. In order to diagnose ulcerative colitis, your doctor must do stool cultures, to rule out other causes of bloody diarrhea like microbial infection, and a sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy.

The cause of ulcerative colitis is not fully understood, although there is evidence that it is related to certain genetic predispositions and certain unfriendly gut bacteria. Dietary factors, immune system imbalances and psychological factors have also been theorized to play a role.

Conventional medical treatment for ulcerative colitis focuses on pharmaceutical medications that suppress your body's immune response. Taken over long periods of time, the medications can cause serious side effects and, while medications can certainly help in the short term, they do not provide a cure for ulcerative colitis. If medications do not adequately control the disease, conventional medicine of recommends surgery for ulcerative colitis to remove most or all of the large intestine. Surgery always carries significant risks and patients who undergo surgery for ulcerative colitis still have very frequent bowel movements and 50% of people still experience inflammation after surgery. Neither of these options addresses the underlying factors that contribute to ulcerative colitis. Fortunately there are safe and effective natural alternatives to drugs and surgery that do.

Ulcerative Colitis: Treatment with Holistic Medicine and Natural Remedies

Natural or holistic treatment for ulcerative colitis is a safer option because it doesn't rely on dangerous chemicals and actually addresses the underlying problems that lead up to the disease.

Natural treatment for ulcerative colitis focuses on:

1. Optimizing digestive function
2. Normalizing gut flora
3. Reducing inflammation
4. Correcting nutritional deficiencies
5. Specific remedies for individual patients.

Despite the fact that we don't know exactly what causes ulcerative colitis, we do know that it is certainly related to the following factors: genetics, poor digestion, unfriendly bacteria in the gut, and inflammation. Most likely a combination of these factors is necessary to develop ulcerative colitis. Unfortunately, we cannot change genetics. However, it is important to realize that your genes, contrary to popular belief, do not determine how your body will behave. Instead, your genes determine how your body, specifically your cells, will respond to their environment. Change the cells' environment and you will change their reaction. (This point cannot be emphasized enough. Too often, people will hear that something is genetic and assume that it means there is nothing that can be done.) Let's look at these one by one.

To optimize digestive function, we need to look at the entire digestive system from top to bottom to make sure everything is functioning as it should. Digestion begins with chewing, continues to the stomach where food is mixed with stomach acid, on to the small intestine where pancreatic juices and bile mix with the food, and lastly to the large intestine. Are all these steps working properly? Does the patient make enough stomach acid? Do they produce adequate digestive enzymes and bile? Imbalances here can be corrected with appropriate supplementation or herbs.

One example of this kind of compromised digestive function is very characteristic of ulcerative colitis. Specialized cells in the intestinal lining secrete a group of chemicals called mucins that are important to maintain the proper consistency of fluids in your digestive tract. Natural medicine has many herbs and nutrients which can correct for this deficiency of mucins.

Secondly: normalizing gut flora. The intestines of those suffering from ulcerative colitis contain greater numbers of unfriendly bacteria and other microbes. Antibiotics and other medications can kill off friendly bacteria in the gut while allowing unfriendly microbes to survive and thrive in their absence. Similarly, certain dietary choices favor the growth of unfriendly gut bacteria over friendly ones. Unfriendly microbes in the digestive tract are a major contributor to disease, particularly inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. So, not only do we need to replenish the good bacteria with appropriate probiotic supplements, but we need to look at any contributing factors that may be favoring the “bad” microbes.

Thirdly: reducing inflammation. As ulcerative colitis is an inflammatory condition, quenching inflammation is an important step to take. Pharmaceutical anti-inflammatory medications can have serious negative effects on health, not the least of which is to damage the gut lining and actually promote gut inflammation. Taking appropriate anti-inflammatory herbs and nutritional supplements is important, but it is even more important to seek out and eliminate anything that may be promoting inflammation in the digestive tract. Food allergies are perhaps the most likely culprits here, although medications and other environmental toxins also need to be considered.

Our fourth step is to correct nutritional deficiencies and optimize nutritional status. Patients with ulcerative colitis are often deficient in many nutrients. Inflammation interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food. This can be exacerbated if a patient has had their large intestine removed surgically in an attempt to treat the disease. In addition, the drugs most commonly used to treat ulcerative colitis can themselves cause nutritional deficiencies.

Nutritional deficiencies can only compound the challenges to health presented by ulcerative colitis. Nutritional deficiencies favor inflammation, slow healing time, interfere with appropriate immune response, and can exacerbate symptoms such as fatigue. Correcting for nutritional deficiencies is an essential part of ulcerative colitis treatment.

The final step is to address the individual patient with specific remedies aimed, not at the diagnosis of ulcerative colitis, but at the individual's constitution and personal health history. Every patient is not the same, so there is no predetermined or set remedy for ulcerative colitis per se. Instead the remedy is based on the individual's subjective experience of his or her symptoms, emotional state, and patterns of daily living (for instance, what their sleep, appetite or energy throughout the day is like). These remedies, either herbal or homeopathic, are generally made from herbs or minerals and are given in small doses daily or less frequently.

If you are suffering from ulcerative colitis and would like to get better, make an appointment today. If you do not live in the New York City tri-state area, but are still interested in natural remedies for ulcerative colitis, phone consultations are available. Call 917-267-9355 or email  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .