An article intended for practitioners of Chinese medicine:

I'll raise a somewhat controversial topic... I feel that sometimes we are actually our patients' bridge to Western medicine.

Yesterday, a patient with uncontrolled ulcerative colitis came to me. Right from the beginning of the interview, she explained to me that she was not willing to take medication for the rest of her life and that she had stopped taking the medication on her own accord.

In such cases, I feel it is my duty to explain to patients the importance of the medications.

In cases of Crohn's and colitis, when there is untreated inflammation, it can lead to irreversible damage and result in surgery in which parts of the intestine are removed.

When I worked at Asaf Al-Harofeh, I encountered people who felt well and therefore stopped taking their medications on their own accord, only to find that their inflammation continued to be active without their knowledge, their intestine became scarred and part of it had to be removed.

Nowadays, there is no reason for this to happen because in recent years there has been a stool test called calprotectin that detects whether the patient has active inflammation in the intestine and it replaces a colonoscopy in many cases. The patient can do the calprotectin test before stopping the medication and also after stopping it to check whether the inflammation returns or not.

So when there are patients who want to give up their medications, I explain to them the importance of monitoring the inflammation, ask them to consult with the doctor and get his consent, and then gradually reduce the medications.

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