Several medicines as well as complementary therapies promises that their use can improve the bowel movement. How can anyone understand whether the medicine is working or not?
Hi, you can suspend the bowel parts into the isolated organ baths and compare the isometric contraction in absence and presence of your drug with both magnitute and frequencies (American journal of surgery 06/2008; 195(6):807-13).
We looked at this during our specialist training. While physicians tend to focus on frequency of bowel movement, what matters most to patients is whether they are uncomfortable when they open their bowels or whether they have to strain. The single-item questionnaire of "Do you feel constipated?" is a very useful one! I go by what the patients say and it usually always is accurate.
Meant to add that the letter we published can be found at:
Constipation: patient perceptions compared to diagnostic tools.
Liz Brown, Iain Lawrie, Viv Barros D'Sa, Sarah Wilcox, Mike Bennett
Palliative Medicine 11/2006; 20(7):717-8.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Physiology