Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | I should "expect to get worse before I get better?"

Hey there
I wanted to start by saying that when I said 'slamming' naturopathy, I wasn't personally offended! :-)I agree wholeheartedly that the nurse was misusing the idea of 'healing crisis' for her own benefit and I think thats sick. I also want to apologise because I read your post very quickly and didn't see enough to register that you did say that there are decent ones out there. Sorry!
I will absolutely agree that 'healing' crisis is a vague term in the sense that the symptoms can be the same as the ones a person was experiencing originially. HOWEVER there is a difference, and if you have been through one, you KNOW its different. let me give myself as an example: when I would get an IBS 'attack' (I don't believe its an attack, I believe its our body being intelligent and expelling and expressing that which is not good) I would feel nauseous and have D or C and it would be over in about 3 hours. My mental health would be awful, I would cry and be soooo fed up and uninspired by life. 'why does this happen to me etc?'. Self pity. A healing crisis, symptom wise, goes on for longer!!! My current one, this week (I came off heathers diet a month ago and put myself back on a naturopathic one) lasted intensley for about 48 hours and 24 hours on each side of coming into it and going out. There is a huge distinct difference. Whilst you feel like you've got the flu (yuck), there is an overwhelming feeling of mental inspiration, focusness, happiness and as each sweat happens, or poo happens, you feel cleaner and cleaner. You just KNOW its a good thing. I have had four healing crises in my life and I have always been aware of them. I am a person that is terrified of throwing up so IBS attacks scare me with the nausea, but during the nausea (which is constant for 48 hours of a healing crisis) I am very very calm. Its just different. Hard to explain.
Now, as for the theory behind it. You can google it and get a lot of explanations that will be better written then mine but basically: when something starts to bother our bodies, lets say when I was 14 a year before I developed IBS, I got a lot of acne on my back, we supress it with drugs or ignore it as a problem on its own and don't ask ourselves WHY is our body expressing itself in that way??? So I surpressed it with acne cream...lo and behold a few months later I start to feel sick...IBS entered my life. I had a terrible diet growing up and I KNOW this caused nutritional deficiencies which caused the malfunction of my nervous system to create IBS. I am convinced. IBS does not exist in indigenous people living in traditional ways. So all these years I have been carrying around excess poo, because I am usually a C, but even when it moves to D, its doesn't expel everything. We should all ideally poo 3 times a day...I know I have only ever reached that amount on a naturopathic diet. Western doctors say once a day is fine, or even less, and that is absurd. Any studies that have been done of indigenous tribes show that they lack the bowel disorders we have in the west and they all poo 3 times a day, after meals. So as the years passed, the waste material ie toxins built up in my gut. Yuck. Making me sluggish, overworked liver, kidneys, adrenals - everything. When I turn this around by eating a diet and establishing a lifestyle conducive with rebalancing my body, its evident that it is going to take lots of time and hard work to get it back. Even years possibly. Its also evident that its not going to be pleasant. There are wonderful feelings of having a clearer head, BUT pooing out years worth of waste does NOT feel good. What happens is that the body sees you are suddenly taking in waaaaay better nutrition, you are exercising and relaxing more, thinking better thoughts. Your immune system has a list of priorities...usually its busy trying to cope with the constant toxins floating around in the system because of the excess waste hanging around (in my case) - a chronic problem. When I take away its need to be working so hard on a chronic problem (because I am no longer perpetuating it on a daily basis) and give it the tools (higher minerals and vitamins and greater nutrition) to work even better...it reaches the point that it feels strong enough to flush the system. A healing crisis always always always occurs straight after a period where you feel AMAZING!!! Just last week I was on a ball!! I had so much energy, clear skin, amazing moods and BOOM...healing crisis. The body finds strength and trusts its own intelligence enough to make this the time to clean. This is a healing crisis. This will never occur until the body has enough tools to make it happen well...and these tools include the mental strength and commitment - the body is way more intelligent then we give it credit for. Why do we always look forward to a holiday and then as soon as we relax on the beach we get sick? I have so many friends this happens to. Because we finally relax enough to let the body take care of crap inside instead of running on adrenaline all the time.
When you say you did a detox on your liver - how long was it for? what kind of detox was it?
I absolutely agree that people with IBS should be very very careful when embarking on a new program. IBS is a nervous dysfuction of the colon. What causes nervous dysfuntion? it doesn't JUST happen...mineral and nutritional deficiencies make nervous dysfunction happen - either through when we were in the womb and our mothers weren't eating well enough for the years before she gave birth OR through our childhood and adulthood. We are ALL very different in our requirements for different minerals...some people need WAY less calcium for example, then others, because of the way they are so efficient at absorbing it etc. A lifestyle that contributes to rebalancing is very time consuming and lots of hard work and one needs to focus on the long term benefits.
I am a purist in the sense that I don't believe in colon flushes, or huge concentrations of supplements etc. I only eat at the most 50% raw. There are no miracle cures. We have to eat wholesome organic diets of foods that we have made from scratch, exercise, sleep enough, do yoga, think positive, surround ourselves with love (and love ourselves) in order to get better. Anything less is just not going to do it. For example, I don't believe in these 3 day detoxes that people do and they expect that to cure them...there is no such thing. WE have to change ourselves for LIFE to achieve true good health. And a healing crisis is definetly part of that. An athelete suffers to build muscle and become the top of his league. A mother suffers in order to push out a baby...creation of new things in life and embarking on new paths is NEVER easy...and its too bad that modern medicine is so obsessed with providing people with the quick fix of drugs to take down a fever etc when all the body is trying to do is express itself and say 'slow down and give me some attention'. ALL of us can look back on when our IBS started and link it to either a stressful time, or a bad lifestyle etc..it never just 'happened'. I truly believe that.
Hope that wasn't too waffly....

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Feel the fear and do it anyway!

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