We have a breakthrough!
The Condition has finally been diagnosed -- more than five months after it laid me off work -- and I can begin treatment.
With indeed the probability that I will be back at the Factory some time in November.
During my rendez-vous with the specialist, Dr Vincent de P., yesterday evening, I expressed guilt about the thousands of euros it has cost the French state to reach this point and determine what I've got, but he told me to stop being an idiot.
He was also reassuring, since it's now clear that while my state of mind played a part in what happened to me back in May, it's "most certainly not all in your head".
I won't post the considerable detail of his diagnosis, since the causes of my serious gut disorder are both physical and psychological and it took Dr de P. a long time to explain it all to me.
But in short: there is something physically wrong with my digestive system (and always will be): it operates bizarrely. Accumulated stress was one of the triggers for my variation of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), but there were others De P. showed me as we waded through the findings in many tests.
I went to the appointment armed with a batch of items I'd found on the Net by following several leads, including Rainer's serotonin tip reported here on Wednesday.
Bless you, Mr B., because the specialist knew about this research already and your link was right on the mark, as part of the diagnosis.
The trouble with IBS, however, is that my particular kind of it won't be the same as those afflicting far more people than I'd ever imagined. IBS Research Update points to three main variants, but even these classifications are broad definitions of symptoms that vary considerably from one person to another, it seems.
"Modern IBS research has focused on the importance of the relationship between events that affect the function of the central nervous system (brain) and the influence these factors ultimately have on the function of the intestines via the specialised enteric nervous system of the intestine (The Brain Gut Axis)," the same site reports.
The treatment, where I'm concerned, will involve three things:
- changes in diet for IBS, which will include the opposite of things I'd been told to do during the months of clinical exams. For instance, where I had to avoid fibres for a long while as part of the testing process, now I should eat more of them...;
- taking appropriate -- and conceivably "alternative" -- medicines to suit me. These vary so much from one case to another that there's no point in detailing which ones;
- stress management strategies. That last link is a bit dangerous.
"The prescription of newer antidepressants (SSRIs) such as fluxetine (Prozac®) and paroxetine (Paxil®) is becoming increasingly commonplace in the treatment of IBS," it reports.
This is correct.
But there's no way I'm going anywhere near Prozac®, Xanax, or any of the other sledgehammers increasingly often prescribed to crack nuts.
My reading in the past few days has confirmed my "gut feeling", partly based on past experience, that such drugs can make nutcases -- and a great deal of money for some pharmaceutical companies -- with even greater ease than they get to the kernel of the problem.
1:38:12 PM link 
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