A friend wrote to me of her son who was diagnosed with toddler diarrhea. A Colonoscopy revealed nothing serious – no inflammation or ulceration. He has been on various medications since being diagnosed a couple of years ago, but they only work short-term and then he is back to explosive stool, leakage of stool into his underwear, or soiling his pants if he can’t get to a toilet soon enough.

Obviously, diarrhea or fecal leakage in children is a condition that seriously hampers their confidence, security and quality of life. Not to mention the anxiety and extra work load for Mom!

My friend’s son is also intolerant to both dairy and wheat and both will aggravate his condition. He is also prescribed a mild laxative once a day (when he gets home from school) – so the combination of the anti-diarrhea medication to stop bowel movments, and then once per day laxative to produce a bowel movement seems to be working.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Solutions

However, as my friend suspects, this in not a good long-term solution as both medications will lead to loss of bowel wall (muscle) tone and function over time. I have done a couple of teleseminars with Bianca James at The Sydney Colon Clinic and she often gets clients whose colons have completely shut down. There is nothing “wrong” with their colon, but exacerbation of these kinds of problems over the years has lead to increasing laxative use, to the point where the colon no longer functions. She has patients who are taking 20 – 40 laxatives per day, and still cannot have a bowel movement. So their gastroenterologist suggests removing their colon entirely.

Bianca takes these patients and restores them to normal bowel health. Of course, it takes quite a long period of time and the person has to be very self-disciplined with diet, supplements and also have daily colon hydrotherapy and probiotic retention enemas. However, these are extreme, long-term cases of bowel malfunction – where instead of getting to the root cause, the person (or the person’s caregiver) has masked the problem with medication.

So it’s great that my friend has contacted me early on (and that you are doing your research and are reading this blog post) so that the root causes of this condition can be fixed in childhood, before things worsen to an extreme state.

To learn how to treat toddler diarrhea, or childhood spastic colon (diarrhea alternating with constipation), head over to the Heal Your Symptoms section of my site, to Toddler Diarrhea.