Reader’s Story [DUMMY CONTENT]

I suffered from severe chronic abdominal pains for almost 15 years. Like most people in the Western world, I went to my GP first and started a long journey of hospital check-ups including ultrasounds, MRI scans and even keyhole surgery. After a couple of years I was diagnosed with endometriosis, although the cycle of pain that I suffered from (2-3 nights of intense cramps every month during ovulation, not menstruation) did not really go in line with the normal symptoms of this illness. No other serious health issues were ever detected that might explain my problem and I was repeatedly told that endometriosis cannot be healed so I eventually resigned myself to learn to live with it. 

The pain would always primarily strike at night. Over time the periods of severe cramps became more and more prolonged and I relied on painkillers to control it. Over so many years, my frequently disrupted sleep took its toll on my energy levels to the point where I wondered whether I might be suffering from ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’. 

Eventually, the pains became a daily (or rather nightly) occurrence and hit me at least once but up to three times at night. Somewhere along the line, I started having regular acupuncture sessions and tried to change my diet – “learning to live with it” was by now becoming pretty much impossible…and so over a four-year-period I tried a total of five different acupuncturists with various levels of success. But nothing really worked.

Looking back, I now realise that part of the reason nothing helped is the fact that Irritable Bowel Syndrome is often confused with menstrual cycle pains in women (i.e. ovulation pain, endometriosis etc.) as the location and type of pain (severe abdominal cramps) are pretty much identical.

Realising eventually through research and observing my own symptoms that I might not be suffering (or not only suffering) from so-called “women’s health issues” but IBS or Chron’s disease still did not bring about physical healing – even though it finally put me on the right track in terms of my acupuncture treatments and diet. It was when I finally came across an explanation about why IBS may manifest in the body that totally resonated with me that my chronic, physical symptoms almost instantaneously started to ebb away and disappeared. This was in July 2019.