After Your Diagnosis, How Can You Get Ongoing IBS Support?

In my last post, I discussed how using multi-disciplinary complementary care practices and therapies to treat your Irritable Bowel Syndrome symptoms were a smart way to achieve the relief you want. Safe and effective, multi-disciplinary complementary care practices “complement” any recommendations or prescription you may have received from your doctor. But once you’re diagnosed, how can you find the ongoing IBS support you need to navigate the low-FODMAP diet and your symptoms?

There remains real challenges to using traditional complementary care. Ongoing office visits with psychologists, therapists, or trainers can be expensive. Classes, books, time off work, and babysitters only increase costs and make multi-disciplinary care unaffordable for most people. As if that wasn’t enough, finding the time to schedule, drive to, and attend all these appointments often isn’t possible. Our lives are already too busy and our schedules overbooked.

The answer may lie in one of healthcare’s biggest trends – telehealth. Telehealth is the delivery and use of health care services and education using a variety of technologies, but primarily web-based ones. Telehealth allows people to get the condition-specific education and instruction they want and answers they need, at a time and place that’s most convenient to them.

Real IBS Support

Telehealth, I believe, is the missing link for IBS sufferers where self-management or self-care, is critical. It picks up where traditional office-based healthcare ends – the moment you walk out the office door. Telehealth, or digital health as it is sometime called, is designed to guide us and help us stay engaged with our treatment plans the 99.9% of the time we’re on our own between doctor visits.

Think back to a time when you last saw your gastroenterologist. Did they provide you with all the tools you needed to manage your IBS once you left their office? Did they tell you about eliminating foods or following a low-FODMAP diet, but then gave you limited or out-of-date handouts? Maybe you had more questions to ask. Maybe these questions didn’t require another office visit or you were just too busy with work or other responsibilities to book another appointment. Maybe you couldn’t afford the co-pay or deductible. Yet, if you were able to get your questions answered you could have moved forward with your treatment plan and possibly felt more comfortable about making the right decision.

What Do Low-FODMAP Dieters Need?

Time and time again, fans of FODMAPLife come to me saying their doctor has told them to follow the low-FODMAP diet. While it’s great doctors are embracing the low-FODMAP diet as a means to help with symptoms of IBS, their recommendations don’t begin to address how to actually use and stay engaged with the diet over an extended period of time.

Wouldn’t it be easy to have IBS-specific instructive video content, podcasts, recipes, meal and exercise plans, guided meditations, and personalized reminders all at your fingertips?

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you had ongoing IBS support and could get the answers you wanted from medical doctors, psychologists, exercise physiologists – an integrative healthcare team – that worked together to help you find the approach best for you?

That’s what telehealth can do – very affordably and right from the smartphone, tablet, or computer you’re reading this post on.

HealthyCare.me provides an evidence-based telehealth program for people suffering from IBS and IBS related symptoms. The program was developed by a MD-led integrative healthcare team, who also serve to answer people’s questions as part of HealthyCare’s community forum. It’s simple, convenient, empowering, and effective. It’s meant to help with people with IBS feel better, while saving them hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars.

To learn more about HealthyCare and the two week free trial of their telehealth program for IBS support, please visit HealthyCare.me. Thank you again to HealthyCare for sponsoring this post.