I get the same sort of hip-area pain. I know that IBS goes crazy with some women's monthly cycles and I remember hearing somewhere that there is a link between IBS-D and menstrual cramps (something about some chemical that causes the cramping also causing intestinal disruptions).
When I was 13, I was on birth control for incredibly painful menstrual cramps and I went on a class trip to New York and had a series of panic attacks. Thus began my romps with social anxiety disorder. Soon after, I developed (or at least noticed--looking back, I may have had them all along without ever knowing) IBS symptoms, but I wasn't fully diagnosed until I was about 17. Sometimes I wonder if taking hormonal pills at such a young age messed up my body chemistry and caused--or brought out a latent predisposition toward--anxiety and if that anxiety perpetuated my IBS.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and change anything. I've long since stopped taking birth control and my IBS is as unruly as ever.
Unlearning/relearning is a complicated procedure that can't always be attained simply through removing the cause of the change--if that cause can even be pinpointed (remember: correlation does not imply causation).
Our bodies and minds have curious ways of rewriting themselves and falling into nasty programming.
Years ago, I had a joint injury and while relearning to walk on my own, my physical therapist told me something very interesting. It takes approximately 24 hours for the mind to remap an aspect of the body's programming. A single day to unravel a pattern you've stuck with for your whole life! That is to say, if you tie your middle finger and your ring finger together for 24-hours (and move them only as a single digit for that entire period of time), even after you remove the ties (i.e., the cause of the change in programming), you will register those two fingers as one digit. It takes a series of relearning and reprogramming after that point for one to relearn how to use those two fingers separately. Knowing this helped me recover from my injury, to recognize that I wasn't broken anymore like my mind was telling me, but that I needed to work up gradually before I could be 100% better.
I don't know how close modern medicine is to telling us what exactly causes IBS and whether it can be avoided or cured, but for the time being, all we really have is how to treat its symptoms (through diet, exercise, and stress management) and the hope that our internal turmoil will stabilize with time.
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Re: How do you get IBS?
