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Happy World IBD Day!

healthymindsetforibd

Today is world IBD day

I am shining a light on everyone who struggles.  

World IBD day is a time we come together to fight against Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative Colitis.  We unite to raise awareness and resources so that we can create better treatments and ultimately a cure.  

I am comforted in knowing we will get there.  

And that this journey will bring us together in support of one another.  We will learn from our common and individual battles and lift each other up.  

While there is much still to fight for, I challenge you to celebrate the many wins that you already own.   Make a list of what IS working, where you are learning, how you have showed up for yourself and those around you.  

Commit to embrace yourself and your body exactly as you are, not in spite of your IBD.  

Fight the system, but do not fight yourself.

Together we’ve got this,

To find out more about my exclusive coaching program for women with IBD, contact me.

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The Power of Belief in IBD

In my medical specialty treating inflammatory bowel disease, the placebo effect has been a thorn in the side of doctors. I have called it the placebo “problem.”

In a clinical trial, when we are testing a new medication to see if it will be effective, we compare it to a “placebo” or fake medication (sometimes referred to as a “sugar pill”). The placebo effect occurs when patients receiving the placebo experience a benefit.

My colleagues and I look at the data published in clinical trials and see the clear improvement in patients getting both real drug and placebo as a problem. It makes it hard to interpret their results if many patients are getting better when they are not receiving the real drug. In trials for inflammatory bowel disease, placebo rates for symptom response have historically been between 20-40%. While accounting for the placebo effect is critical to know whether a drug is truly effective, I was ignoring an equally exciting and important part of what these studies show.

Over the past few years, I have begun to look at the placebo response with curiosity and excitement. If patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis can objectively feel better by just believing that this is possible, than why are we not harnessing the power of the mind more and learning to do it better? We may not even have to “trick” ourselves into believing we are getting a real medication. Studies have shown that even when people know they are getting a placebo, they may still experience improvement in symptoms.

While there is clearly a very strong mind-body connection in IBD, I think we have to be careful when we recommend harnessing the power of the mind to manage disease. The placebo response as it relates to symptoms is high, but is much lower when we look at more objective markers of inflammation such as blood inflammatory markers (CRP, ESR), stool inflammatory markers (calprotectin) and healing of the tissues seen on colonoscopy. Doctors, including myself, become concerned that patients will take this to mean that they should work on mindset instead of taking traditional medications. We worry that our patients might then suffer long-term complications of undertreating their disease. A better approach is to capture as much benefit as possible using the right medications and the right mindset tools.

In medicine, we often tell patients that they are likely to have a 10-15% response rate to a certain drug. That is what we call the delta- or difference- between the response of the patients who received drug and those who received placebo in a clinical trial. So, for instance, if 20% of subjects receiving placebo responded to a medication and 35% responded to a drug, the drug’s overall efficacy (the difference) is 15%. When I quote these rates of response with medications, my patients often become discouraged at the low likelihood that they will get better. They may not even want to take a chance on a medication that might really work for them. However, when we combine the medication and placebo response, things look much better. The full effect is 35%, not 15%.

So what if I told you that there was something you could do that would make your current medicines twice as effective at reducing your symptoms? What if I also told you it had no traditional medication side effects (unless you count better relationships, increased productivity and less pain)?

I think of the addition of the placebo response to traditional therapy as a starting place. There are then ways that we can train the brain to be even more efficient. Coaching and mindset tools are designed to help us work on believing that getting better is not only possible but inevitable. Then out of that place of determination, we take the actions we need to help the body heal.

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