Current diagnostic methods are such that an average Crohn’s patient
suffers symptoms for couple of years before the right diagnosis is made,
while also withstanding "it's all in your head" attitude from both doctors
and family / friends.
If standard treatments for this disease were even fairly enough to control
it, I might have not done all this research on my own. Reality looks much
grimmer - relapse rates are high, need for surgery that just leads to more
surgery, a lot of suffering and risks associated with treatment side effects.
And above all, the cause of Crohn's disease is still unknown, so all
treatments are just symptomatic and don't lead to being cured.
It seams that there is a lot of research to be done in order to:
-
get to an earlier diagnosis when the promise of recovery is the greatest
-
discover routes of transmission if proved to be infectious
-
find treatments that help more and have fewer side effects, to preserve
as much health as possible and minimize suffering until a cure is
discovered
-
evaluate empirical treatments for suspected causes hoping to find a cure
I urge you to first visit other people's Crohn related pages, some of them
in my favorite links. I have learned quite a lot
from them, but I'll try to overlap information as least as possible and
I'll post here only additions to widely accepted understanding and treatment
of the disease. The information here is from medical papers in established
journals and accredited institutions, and should be viewed as a seed of
the new knowledge that is going to change our understanding and treatment
of Crohn's in the years to come.
Go back to the front page.