Managing constipation

Constipation is a very common problem for people of all ages. I met a 7 year old girl on Friday who impressed me with her unique way of managing her problem. Basically for her it started when she was about 3 years old, complicated by a slightly deformed rectum and anus. Nowadays what she does is to make sure that she poos 2-3x a day, and to describe her poo according to the stool chart.

The aim is to have a well formed but reasonably soft poo, i.e. type 3 or 4. If she has no poo for a day, or if poo has been hard (type 1 or 2) then she will tell mummy and mummy will add movicol (an osmotic laxative, makes poo softer) into her breakfast. And she will let mummy know if she has done a poo at school or not. So now at the age of 7 she is an expert in the stool chart and managing constipation. She now rarely needs any laxative at all because it's all been so regular now with the sensible use of movicol.

You might think this is so simple but this is the very first time I have heard about constipation being managed like this. Usually doctors prescribe laxative for a fixed length of time, and patient would take it blindly, without consideration about what is happening to their own bowel motions. So more often than not, they will come back to the doctor, either saying that constipation is still there, or that they are now having diarrhoea, either way relying the doctor to prescribe some more medication to sort out the problem. I must say this too often happens to the elderly patients. I am going to start recommending this little girl's method of managing constipation to other patients from now on.


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