How long does it take to treat digestive disorders?

There is really no one-size-fits-all standard answer to this question. Among the patients I have come into contact with, short-term acute disorders caused by improper diet can mostly return to normal within 1-2 weeks. For chronic disorders with irregular work and rest and eating habits all year round, accompanied by long-term anxiety and stress, there are also many patients who need more than half a year to stabilize.

I met a young girl who had just graduated last month. She ate the ice powder and spicy kebabs from the night market for three days. After vomiting and diarrhea, she always felt her stomach was distended. She felt panicked after just two mouthfuls. She also had diarrhea frequently. A gastroscopy and colonoscopy showed no organic problems such as ulcers and inflammation. This is a typical functional disorder after acute stimulation. I only prescribed probiotics and digestive enzymes for her for a week, and told her not to eat spicy ice cream, drink some warm millet porridge or pumpkin porridge in the morning and evening, and not to stay up late checking her phone until midnight. The little girl's compliance was very good. She drank the porridge for ten days and stopped going out to have skewers with friends on weekends. Last week, I came over specifically to tell me that she could eat hot pot normally without any discomfort. It only lasted 12 days.

But it would be too optimistic to think that all digestive disorders can be solved in two weeks. A young man who was engaged in Internet operations came to me before and said that he had always been constipated and had diarrhea in the past two or three years. He would always suffer from constipation when rushing to launch a project. The toilet has almost become his second work station. He secretly bought several probiotics from Internet celebrities and ate them. He seemed to feel better after eating them. As soon as he worked overtime and stayed up late, he immediately returned to his original shape. I screened him and ruled out problems such as enteritis and polyps. I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, a chronic digestive disorder. In addition to adjusting his medication plan, I also made an appointment with him to take 15 minutes to walk downstairs twice a day no matter how busy he was. Don't always order takeaways that are heavy in oil and salt for dinner. Try to cook some noodles or steam some whole grains by yourself. Don't carry it when you are stressed, and occasionally catch a fish to catch your breath. He had been undergoing treatment for nearly four months. He came here recently for a review and said that he had no diarrhea during the past half month while working on projects, and he finally got rid of the days of carrying antidiarrheal medicine with him.

In clinical practice, patients always ask me if they can recover within a week by taking some special medicine. Many people also think that they don’t need to take medicine as long as they adjust their diet and rest. In fact, both of these ideas are a bit extreme. If it is just a transient disorder caused by eating bad food occasionally, you may have diarrhea twice and it will be cured by itself, without even taking medicine. ； But if it has been repeated for several months, and has even affected normal work and travel, just relying on forceful adjustment of lifestyle will be very slow to achieve results. On the contrary, it will make people anxious and aggravate gastrointestinal problems.

In fact, regulating the stomach is like repairing a damaged lawn. If it is only a small area that has been trampled and bald, just water some water and apply some fertilizer, and new grass will grow in a week or two.； If the entire lawn is hardened and overgrown with weeds, it must first be plowed, weeded, and slowly cultivated. How can you expect it to turn back to green in ten and a half months? And many people ignore the impact of emotions on the gastrointestinal tract. The term brain-gut axis sounds technical, but in fact, to put it bluntly, it means that if you are so anxious that you can’t sleep every day, and you are so angry that you have no place to vent your anger, your gastrointestinal tract will also “get angry”. If you supplement it with nutrients and condition it, and at the same time fill it with negative emotional “garbage” every day, the recovery speed will naturally not be faster.

In fact, you don’t have to keep counting the days to figure out when you will feel better. Start by drinking one less cup of iced milk tea today and eating a hot breakfast on time. As long as you find the right triggers and adjust the direction in the right direction, most people will slowly feel the changes in their gastrointestinal tract. Instead, worrying about "why are you not feeling better yet?" every day is the culprit that slows down recovery.