Visiting Your Doctor
Your doctor should be consulted before you make any moves that will affect your disease. Whether it’s in the medication you’re taking, any tests you’re scheduled to undergo, or other lifestyle alterations including a diet change, your GI doctor at least deserves to know your feelings on the matter, whether you decide to listen to everything he says or not.
I dislike going to the doctor as much as anybody - no, actually I hate it - but when you have Crohn’s you shouldn’t just go when you don’t feel well. Conditions inside your body can change pretty rapidly, and keeping track of them periodically with your doctor’s help can save you from a lot of trouble in the long run.
Take my story, for example. I decided to go on a Crohn’s-oriented diet, stop taking all my medication, and not visit the doctor for over a year. I felt great, and I didn’t think I needed medical advice anymore because I’d found something that worked.
When I suddenly started having abdominal pain that built up over the course of a couple weeks, I was bewildered. It finally got to the point where I couldn’t ignore it any longer, so I went to the doctor. He ordered a colonoscopy and found a stricture in my sigmoid colon so tightly closed that he couldn’t finish the procedure.
A couple of years and a colon resection surgery later, I’m now regretting every minute of my decision to throw modern medicine out the window. The diet I use definitely works, but staying on maintenance drugs balances out any slip-ups I might make and does all the more to keep my body in remission.
As a general rule of thumb, if six months have gone by and you’ve felt good enough that you haven’t scheduled a doctor’s appointment, do so now. If you’re in tip-top shape, checking in with the doctor will make you feel better about what you’re doing to combat your disease. If you aren’t, you’ll hopefully have caught any problems early enough to do something about them in the least invasive way possible.