LDN for Crohn's Disease
Imagine being able to eat real food again! The use of LDN for
Crohn's Disease came almost as an afterthought. The first people to benefit from Low Dose Naltrexone were AIDS and HIV patients with severely lowered immunity. In tiny doses, the Naltrexone encourages the body to produce more endorphins, which in turn helps to regulate the immune system. While LDN has shown results when treating such far reaching diseases as Multiple Sclerosis, Cancer, HIV and Parkinson's Disease, it does not actually work on any of these diseases directly, but instead helps
the body's own immune system combat the problems. This is where LDN is seen to help patients with Crohn's Disease.
In some ways, Crohn's patients are the luckiest of the LDN patients. We actually have double blind testing to prove the effectiveness and safety of LDN in cases of Crohn's Disease.
Read More
A Short History of Low Dose Naltrexone
Naltrexone, in very
low doses, lowers endorphin levels triggering the body to produce more. Sounds like a bit of a contradiction, but there are legions of MSer's who are lined up behind this drug. It also raises questions about whether or not immune disorders are caused by an "overactive" immune system, or simply a malfunctioning one.
Read More
My Story and Why I Care
My mother has suffered from Crohn's-like symptoms for years. She was never officially diagnosed and there is a question whether it was Irritable Bowel Syndrome or Crohn's or just horrible digestive inflamation, but the results were the same -- unpredictible and frequent diarrhea with the resulting mal-nutrition, lack of absorbtion and severe anemia. The doctors tried drug after drug, especially based on Prednisone steroids to try to treat the symptoms, with essentially no effort to identify the problem.
Monthly, my Mom went in for IV infusions of iron as her digestive system was incapable of
absorbing it. When she would get nearly to weak to walk, they would give her drugs to try to get her hemoglobin back to a functioning condition. It did not take long before her internal organs, especially the kidneys, began to fail.
In the spring of 2009, the unthinkable happened. I lost my job and with it my employer provided health insurance. I had Multiple Sclerosis and since 2000 had been giving myself a daily shot of Copaxone in the hope of slowing the progression. It is hard to tell how bad I might have been without the Copaxone, but even with it, I had gone down hill. My hands were numb, my left leg sometimes would not hold me, my brain was in a dark fog and oh, the fatigue.
There were days when all I could do was try to look forward under my eyelids, knowing that staying in bed would only atrophy me worse.
There was no way that I could continue to pay the $2,000 per month for the daily shots and even the $600 per month for health insurance was pretty much out of our reach. It was time to do some research on what else might be available.
The heavens were looking down on me, as I discovered and then delved into LDN. Low Dose Naltrexone -- the protocol that so many MS sufferers were crediting with giving them their lives back.
My experience was so positive, that within weeks, my Mom was begging to take it too. HER story is even more impressive than mine, with total remission within days of starting to take LDN.
Read More
More interesting links to resources
- Some Reveiws from Patients who use LDN for Crohn's Disease
- Childhood Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC)