An article intended for practitioners of Chinese medicine:

Post-infectious IBS

It is a disruption of the digestive system caused by a stomach virus, bacteria, or infection (spoiled food). That is, a person who ate spoiled food/was exposed to a stomach virus or parasite and has since started suffering from digestive problems.

When people come to the clinic with a story of post-infectious IBS, it is customary to treat them as having a "normal" sensitive (irritable) bowel and treat them with the same tools that are used to treat a sensitive bowel in terms of medications, nutrition, and complementary therapies. However, from what I see in the clinic, the treatment that usually helps those with a "normal" sensitive bowel will not necessarily be effective for a sensitive bowel that developed after an infection/parasite/virus.

How do we know for sure that this is a sensitive intestine after an infection and not a "normal" sensitive intestine?

When the patient tells us that at a certain point his digestive system went haywire, he knows how to put his finger on the day/event that started it all.

This will often happen in people who have never suffered from digestive problems, as opposed to a "normal" sensitive gut in which people have suffered from digestive problems since childhood/adolescence.

For us as practitioners of Chinese medicine, it is very important to understand whether this is classic irritable bowel syndrome or post-infectious IBS in order to understand the correct treatment.

I will usually try to start with classic treatment for irritable bowel syndrome (of course, depending on the Chinese diagnosis), but if I don't see immediate improvement, I will move on to treatment for lingering pathogenic factor, which in my experience responds well to treatment through the SHAO YANG and JUE YIN layers.

In addition, it is important to prepare the patient that the treatment process will be longer, with many ups and downs, unlike regular treatment where improvement comes much faster.

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