The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America recently posted an updated guide on complementary and alternative medicine, outlining many of the practices people with IBD sometimes engage in as a way of keeping their disease in remission. The guide is available here for download.
The guide is short and just gives a brief overview of the options available. It doesn’t go into any detail of how to actually engage in these treatments; that’d take some more research on your part if you are actually interested in this sort of thing. I, myself, never tried any of these techniques as I didn’t know about them. Most of these practices haven’t been studied the same way medicines are studied, so positive results for one person does not necessarily imply positive results for everybody.
Question: Have you tried any complementary or alternative medicine and if so, did it work for you? Reply to this post.
This is what I was doing all last week. This video is a chance to show off some of the great scenery of the Superior Hiking Trail, but more importantly it addresses a concern many people have before surgery: will a J-pouch impact the strenuous physical activities that you used to enjoy?
The short answer is: no! You should be able to return to the activities and sports you loved once you have sufficiently recovered from your final surgery.
I just wanted to drop by and give everybody a quick update on what’s going on with me. Last week I was a volunteer cabin counselor at Camp Oasis, an IBD summer camp for kids. More on that later but everything went fantastic! Tomorrow I’m off to backpack for a week, so I will continue to be out of commission. I responded to a few emails and comments very quickly just now but for those who have sent longer messages I will get to them next week. Keep patient and continue to send me messages about any questions or concerns you have!
On a more important note, sometime this past week the video views for this vlog exceeded 100,000! That’s a fantastic number and makes me very excited. When I first started this vlog it wasn’t as popular, as most things are in the beginning, and I made a secret goal of exceeding 100,000 video views within a year. That was on October 1, 2008. I had no clue how I would reach this number but they say to set your sights high so I did. And now that goal has been reached with two months to spare! Thanks to everybody for all your support with this project, things are going very well and there’s more to come in the future.
To give you some side context, some college friends and I once had a YouTube channel up that featured various comedy videos of our college antics, the kind of stuff you usually see on YouTube. We thought we were pretty funny but I guess not. It took that channel over 3 and a half years to breach the 100,000 views mark. The lesson is: keep your projects focused and targeted at a specific audience, even if it’s a niche audience like the IBD community, and success will come your way.
I just wanted to let everybody know that for the first two weeks of August I will be out of town and unable to update the United Colon Vlog. Well, there’s a possibility of an update next week Saturday but no guarantee.
For the next week I am going to be a counselor at Camp Oasis, a week-long summer camp for kids and teens with inflammatory bowel diseases. I’m very excited about this and hope everything goes alright. Once I come back I can let you know how that goes. Then, the week after, I will be backpacking with some friends, so I will be obviously be incommunicado during both of these weeks. Last summer was kind of a bummer as I was going through surgery and recovering from all that, so this backpacking trip is long-awaited.
Hopefully during this time you can catch up on some of the Past Videos.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc., feel free to continue emailing me during this time. I’m hoping for a couple hundred messages when I get back to keep me busy for awhile.
And if you want to help out the UCVlog during this time, check out the Gutbending Declaration. With this project I’m looking for people to either send me short videos or upload them to YouTube. Anybody who has had their colon removed and has lived with an ileostomy is invited to participate! I’m looking for people to declare with me that living with an ileostomy is better than living with ulcerative colitis. I’m getting ready to post the first video of this project but need more videos first! If you can help me out with this that would be fantastic.
Many of us have ostomies only temporarily. And many people around the world are in need of supplies. So if you have any extra unused, new, and clean supplies, send them our way!
We are collecting supplies to send to Haiti with a medical team!
Current progress:
1393 bags and flanges
2591 medical supplies
