I have been suffering with diarrhea and nausea for five years. doctors ran multiple tests and say nothing is wrong. if I am careful with how I eat, my stomach will get better until I get a cold ( any type, anywhere) then it attacks my stomach too. how can specialists say nothing is wrong? any thoughts on what it could be because my multiple doctors say nothing is wrong!
Note: this post has been split off from this old thread. As medical advice, it’s best suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
No one can possibly come to any sort of reasonably useful conclusion from the limited information you’ve given us. Diarrhea and nausea are both notoriously vague symptoms. What tests have the doctors run? What were the results? What triggers your symptoms? What do you mean by eating “carefully”? Etc, etc.
Oh yeah? Well I have been suffering from diarrhea for the past 13 years. Doctors have been absolutely no help whatsoever. The best they could do was at one point to “diagnose” me as having IBS. I put diagnose in quotations because that illness is just diagnosed by an exclusion of other known illnesses. But saying I had IBS did nothing as far as helping me with my problem. No dietary changes of any sort ever had any impact on my diarrhea.
Ultimately, I found that relying on daily, extremely high doses of Imodium (loperamide HCL) was the ONLY way I could function day-to-day. So that is how I’ve lived for the past several years. I’ve been concerned about having to resort to taking four to five times the maximum daily recommended dose of the drug but I’ve talked about it with my doc and he said that considering the circumstances, it was ok.
You have Giardia, unless your doctors have already tested and/or treated you for that, in which case, something else is wrong.
usual internet caveats, JMO, IANAD.
Has Cholestyramine been tried? This is a med to treat high cholesterol with the side effect of causing constipation. Unless your cholesterol is too low (unlikely) it might work for you. My gastro doctor suggested it for my chronic lymphocytic colitis and it works like a charm.
Haven’t tried that yet, thanks for tip! I will definitely run it by my doc.
BTW, I should mention that my chronic diarrhea is related to the nerve damage that was a result of my spinal cord injury.
I started suffering the same symptoms about 1.5 yrs ago. Went through the same battery of tests for everything from ulcers to giardia to liver/gallbladder dysfunction. Had endoscopies and colonoscopies with multiple biopsies taken and everything came back negative. After eliminating all of the above, my end diagnosis was IBS.
Diet-wise, I’ve found that a high-fibre/low-fat diet helps. As for meds, I’ve found Zofran to be a life saver. It does wonders to reduce the nausea and has the beneficial side-effect of being constipating. It’s well worth looking into.
My niece suffered through most of her teen years from those symptoms, until they decided she has celiac disease. She’s now gluten-free and very healthy. The only time she has a relapse is if she unwittingly or purposefully eats something containing gluten. Since the gluten-free pop-tart hit the market she hasn’t purposefully slipped up…it was her one true Achilles’s heel!