I'd be curious to know if anyone can anecdotally confirm a slightly different, but similar connection to IBS: chronic pain.
I have read that IBS is implicated in fibromyalgia, including shoulder pain, but I am interested in the reverse causal direction: can a painful shoulder injury cause IBS?
If nerves and the gut are tightly connected, it seems plausible that pain receptors would also be implicated in both directions. (Of course, going back to the link to the central nervous system, your brain doesn't have pain receptors, but it is connected to every nerve in your body.)
I don't have chronic pain personally, but anecdotally (from friends, not just myself), there tend to be general correlations between anxiety, depression, food intolerances, allergies, chronic pain, migraines, chronic tiredness, eczema, etc., which of course makes intuitive sense. It's not surprising that mental health has an effect on these other things; it's more surprising that the opposite could be true. It really just seems like everything is much more connected than we'd like to think
It really just seems like everything is much more connected than we'd like to think
I think you're right. So much so that my doctor actually suggested prescribing SSRIs for the IBS, even in a patient (such as myself) having no signs of clinical depression. I didn't take the prescription, so I couldn't say if it would have helped in my case, but I went home and read a study that SSRIs have been shown to alleviate IBS. Pretty interesting.
I am in fact rather interested! A few years back, I went through a lot of physical therapy for a shoulder injury, and within a month or two, I had a year and a half long bout of IBS and leg cramps. Ultimately I controlled the condition (somewhat) with diet, but I can't help but think the real problem was simply that my pain was the original trigger.
Since the problem has only mostly subsided, I'd be thankful for any ideas about just what was going on.
Cartilage has no blood vessels. It gets all its nutrients from osmosis. Wastes are removed the same way.
Osmosis is a less efficient means than direct blood supply, so joints probably tend to accumulate wastes firsts if they aren't all being removed from the body for some reason. Anecdotally, cartilage and nervous system tissues are the last things to heal. Everything else has to improve first.
Also, some infections, like strep, are known to settle in the joints. The shoulder is one of the larger joints and has a fair amount of cartilage and similar tissues.
So, you injure a major joint and old infection hiding out in the joint gets released into the blood stream. This impacts the entire body.
But the gut is where you find 70 to 80 percent of immune cells in the body. My hypothesis is that it is because food is the single largest threat we deal with on a daily basis.
So you have what amounts to an internal toxic spill and it stresses the gut because that's the largest concentration of cleanup crews. Dealing with this crisis taxes the entire immune system, but you are most aware of impact on the gut because that's where the vast majority of your immune function is found.
That's a very interesting theory. I had assumed that the immune-system hadn't been implicated in my case (all the immune-system bloodwork came back normal), but now you have me wondering just a bit, so thanks for sharing.
Your body goes to enormous lengths to normalize your blood because you rapidly die if your blood leaves a fairly narrow pH range. So it will strip your bones of calcium, leaving you with osteoporosis, to keep your blood as close to normal as possible.
I am skeptical about the value of blood tests. It seems to me that by the time a blood test shows a problem, things have to be pretty bad. I think reliance on blood tests probably misses a lot.
Edit: I was almost certainly barking up the wrong tree here: calcium levels have nothing to do with how much your joints pop. :-)
Hmm, well that part about calcium is quite interesting, at least in my case. I say this because right around the time I started getting leg cramps, my joints started popping like crazy.
My working hypothesis was always that the tight muscles were pulling on the joints, causing them to pop more easily. But maybe now I was actually being slightly deprived of calcium? I say slightly because the calcium blood levels were normal.
I have read that IBS is implicated in fibromyalgia, including shoulder pain, but I am interested in the reverse causal direction: can a painful shoulder injury cause IBS?
If nerves and the gut are tightly connected, it seems plausible that pain receptors would also be implicated in both directions. (Of course, going back to the link to the central nervous system, your brain doesn't have pain receptors, but it is connected to every nerve in your body.)