Crohn's Disease IBD - They Are the Same Thing, Aren't They?

Crohn's Disease is an Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD. Inflammatory Bowel Disease is a group of illnesses, the main two are Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. Both of these illnesses are very similar but the main difference between them is that ulcerative colitis is only located in the large bowel or colon, where Crohn's Disease can affect the person anywhere in the digestive tract from the mouth to the anus.

At times it can be hard for doctors to know if you have Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's Disease. A couple of years after I was diagnosed my doctors decided that maybe I didn't have Crohn's after all, perhaps it was Ulcerative Colitis. Eventually they changed their minds and I was back to having Crohn's again.

Some people can be told that they have IBD as it isn't really clear whether they have Crohn's or Ulcerative Colitis. Western treatment can vary between Crohn's and Ulcerative colitis, but it if you have not been diagnosed with anything other than IBD then it probably won't really make much difference not knowing in most cases.

A good thing as is that many natural methods that work well for Crohn's also work well for Ulcerative Colitis. A great place to start is to keep a food dairy and write down what you eat during the day, so if the next day you start to feel not that well you can go back over the last few days and see what you have eaten. You can then tell if there is something there that you may think has caused you a problem.

Over time you maybe able to see a pattern with certain foods and you could try not eating that food for awhile to see if that makes a difference in your Crohn's Disease. It may only take a couple of days to make a difference, for some people they will need to eliminate that food for perhaps over a month to see an improvement. There are other ways to see what foods are causing you problems but a food diary is a good place to start and can give you some good results.