IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) long term treatment is different to IBS conventional treatment which is acute or short term treatment of the symptoms.

In our long term treatment we are looking at the underlying causes of IBS.

If we can address the root cause of any problem we can sort the problem out completely.

To understand what the root cause of IBS is we have to go beyond conventional medicine, which looks at symptoms and treats each one.

What we do is take all the symptoms and work back to see what causes all of them. For us the root of the problem is an autoimmune disease.

In conventional medicine an autoimmune disease is one where the immune system attacks the normal body structures. This would explain the inflammation of the bowel and the irritable part of IBS.

We look at this differently and say that the immune system is not working correctly. This is explained in the article About our immune system

Briefly, the immune system has 2 parts. An inflammatory response and a regulatory response. The inflammatory response is cause when the body is irritated in some way, histamine and other chemicals are released to mop up the irritant. The second response, regulatory, is to stop the continuation of the inflammation.

So what we have in IBS is the continued inflammatory response and no regulatory response.

In order to fix this we have to see how the regulatory response is stimulated. Interestingly it is controlled by the bacteria in our gut, ie the gut microbiome or probiotics.

According to our model the microbiome in the gut is not functioning correctly. This is due to a number of factors that cause an imbalance in the gut bacteria. This would mean we don’t have enough of the beneficial bacteria or we have the wrong ones.

The solution is to add the beneficial bacteria back by taking a probiotic.

Will any probiotic do?

That is a very pertinent question and needs a new article to answer it. Have a look at this article IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) Treatment With A Probiotic)