Saturday, July 6, 2013

A Cure for Constipation, Gases and Piles

The human body is made up of a number of systems
The skeletal system, the nervous system, the respiratory system for our breathing, the circulatory system for our blood, and the digestive system for our food, are some of the main ones.
I will take up the digestive system, also called the alimentary canal.
This consists of a pipe of more than 30 ft in length.
The fore-end is our mouth and the nether end is our rectum.
In between we have the stomach, duodenum, the small and large intestines.
These four organs carry out their work automatically without any help from us except to see that they don't become ineffective because of our dietary mistakes.
We have the power to control the two ends.
We care for the mouth, brush it once after getting up in the morning and again before going to bed.
We floss and do hot gargle, if required.
We go to the dentist if our teeth give us problems or to the ENT specialists if the throat gives us pain. That should be for it is the first to be seen by the outside world and may make or break your office, home or social life.
But what about the nether end?
Except for a perfunctory wipe with a toilet paper or a slush wash with water, we forget all about that end unless piles occur.
I agree this end is not visible to the outside world unless you be an exhibitionist but shouldn't we take more care of it.
Those who live in apartments know that if the drain pipes are blocked, water flows back into the toilets or kitchen, creating a mess.
Then we start looking for a plumber to clean the pipe.
As I said earlier, our alimentary canal is a pipe and if the rectum end gets blocked the waste enters the large intestine creating problems.
Then we start using various home remedies or allopathic purgatives like "dulcolax" to clean this pipe. There are various Ayurvedic formulations under different names which liquefy your stool so that it moves out quickly.
 They sometime liquefy it so much that you cannot leave your home.
Further, we old people have another embarrassing problem. We pass out gases of both the silent foul smelling variety and the shockingly loud neck turning one.
What is the solution?
Last year, after coming back from Ahmedabad in July, I had mentioned in our blog of an enema set up I had installed at home.
I am proud to say that both my wife and I have been using it very satisfactorily for two years with no side effects.

A picture of the same is given below. 


This enema kit with extra insertion pipes (in the bottom picture) for use of individual members of the family can be bought in any of the medical instrument shops in Central Avenue, besides Central Metro Station.
Some of us had mentioned to me that the enema pipe may damage the sphincter muscles at the entrance of the anus or the lining of the rectum.
We use a a few drops of soap water to lubricate the anus before the insertion so there is no damage or pain.
People normally eat every three to 4 hours so our large intestine releases stool into the rectum in the same intervals.
If we can wash out the rectum when the rectum is loaded, say every six hours, our body will not release any obnoxious gases.
Once the rectum is unloaded, there is no back pressure on the large intestine.
This is beneficial for those who are having piles problems.
We Indians are in the habit of eating hot, spicy food.
This aggravates ones piles and going to the toilet becomes a painful affair. For the whole of last year, I am pleased to say, that our piles have not troubled us at all.
For a smiling non-painful start to the day, I would recommend it to everyone who have their own toilets, not common toilets like we had in school.
After using it for the whole year, I just wonder, why I had not started using this earlier.
I assure you, you too will feel the same. 

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