Yoga for migraines and ibs6/23/2023 The most difficult part of IBS is that patients feel like they're trying medications and nothing is working and they're never gonna get better, and then, you lead to depression, not going to school. Here at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, we make sure to address all of these theories and all these potential medications and therapeutic options in a multidisciplinary clinic with a physician, a dietician, and a psychologist. A key component to all this is understanding the brain-gut connections and that's where the psychologists come in and using their cognitive behavioral therapies, you can really redirect the nerves as well as decrease stress levels. It is very much proven that combination of therapies is helpful. We also use yoga and acupuncture to help relax the intestines, and there's very good evidence that even just exercise can help with IBS. Dietary changes can be extremely helpful. We can sometimes use medications that help symptomatic treatments. We tend to see it more during stressful periods or certainly, during teenage years, when you're going through a lot of changes in your body. If you generally have a hypersensitive nervous system like we think that kids with IBS do, and you're going through a lot of stressors – or even a lot of happy moments - that can all be felt in your GI tract. Everybody feels symptoms in their GI tract when they're nervous, when they're excited regardless if you have IBS or not. The overwhelming theory that we act on is that there's very sensitive nerves in the GI tract that are sort of over-analyzing normal processes. We see that these type of symptoms run in families. Some theories involve stressors and just generally being a high-stress person, that can cause an irritation in the gut. It's important for a patient to see a specialist, a pediatric gastroenterologist, for example, to make sure that we know what is what and be able to differentiate and finalize a diagnosis. In IBS, patients get better over time, whereas in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, this is a chronic disease and so, we’ll need medications for majority of your life. Inflammatory Bowel Disease is an autoimmune disorder. ![]() IBS is an irritation in the nerves of the intestinal tract. They can present with very similar symptoms which is part of the difficulty in differentiating. IBS is Irritable Bowel Syndrome, where as IBD is Inflammatory Bowel Disease. It can be quite interruptive in their lives. The pain and the discomfort can often interrupt normal daily activities, school for a lot of kids. But we know that the pain is real and we know that the symptoms are real. Similar to migraines, there isn't a test. We do lots of testing to rule out other diseases. The tricky thing about IBS is that there is no specific test that we can use to say 100% you have this. So, it's pain and then, either constipation or diarrhea, bloating, and sometimes just a feeling of gas and liquids moving through. ![]() ![]() ![]() The diagnosis is based off clinical symptoms. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a disease of the GI or intestinal tract in which patients have pain. I am a pediatric gastroenterologist here at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
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