Skip to main content

Book Report

In honor of all the kids going back to school this week, I wanted to do my own book review as I found this book at the library a while back and wanted to share it with you all.

Your Child with Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Family Guide for Caregiving

I recently read this book which is published by the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. It was very informative and I'd like to recommend it to patients and parents.


It is written and edited by medical professionals who want to be more educated on their child's condition. It begins by defining the various conditions that make up IBD (Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, and indeterminate colitis) and talking about the possible epidemiology of IBD.  The second part of the book touches on diagnosing IBD and goes into the symptoms a child may exhibit. There is a very helpful chapter (5), entitled How to Prepare for a Visit to your Child's IBD Doctor. It gives a comprehensive list of topics to discuss with your child before the visit so that everyone is on the same page and that you have a list of questions that you want to ask together. Another tip provided was not to promise your child there will be no blood tests, as this may not always be the case.

Is any family truly this happy? 

There is a section that talks about the importance of talking about the child's diagnosis as a family, and including siblings at an appropriate age. This can make the child with IBD feel more understood by the other family members and opens the family communication. Siblings want to know if it is contagious, if it is fatal, and how will this change the family dynamic. Siblings are often the ones who have the most questions but are afraid to ask, and may have frustration over receiving less attention, so parents should spend one-on-one time with each child. Also, all children, including the child with IBD, need to have the same rules and consequences so that there is no favoritism. 

If I eat the veggies, I may have a stomachache, but aren't I supposed to eat my veggies? 

An interesting statistic the book quotes is that "children with IBD symptoms eat only about half the calories they require for their age. Children and teens with IBD need 20-40% more energy than children who do not have IBD." It can be helpful to talk with a nutritionist who specializes in IBD to make sure the child's nutrional needs are being met either with food or supplements. It can be hard for kids who have dietary restrictions due to their disease to find a variety of foods that will give them the nutrients they need.


Last but not least, the family dynamic is upset when a child suffers from a chronic illness. Parents need to have supports in place in order to manage their own anxiety about their child's condition and their child's future. At each developmental level, the child may react differently to his condition and to the other family members, and the book goes through various life stages in Chapter 15.  There are many stressful transitions for kids, including middle school, high school, going from a pediatric doctor to an adult gastroenteroligist etc. These transitions should be handled with care, and much communication about expectations and who will do what task. Ultimately, the goal is for the teenager to be successfully transitioned and take ownership of his or her IBD. So overall, this book is a great resource for a newly diagnosed child with IBD and is pretty up-to-date since it was published in 2010. Doctors from three renowned IBD pediatric centers were the editors so I found it to be very accurate, yet patient-friendly. Hope you make time to give it a read!

Popular posts from this blog

So You Have IBD During a Pandemic

Hey! What's going on? Been pretty boring over here in Chicago. Ok I don't need to elaborate on what the hell is going on in the world. We are being bombarded with information - some accurate, a lot inaccurate - about this pandemic. It's very easy to become completely overwhelmed by it all. We've been forced, pretty damn quickly, to completely overhaul our way of life for the greater good. To reduce the strain on our healthcare system of the sick and dying. And us humans are generally bad with rapid, monumental change that we really don't have a lot of say in. Our little reptilian brains do what they're supposed to do (prime us for fight or flight or freeze) but our advanced "thinking" parts of our brain have to interject with all sorts of unhelpful thoughts, thereby sending some of us off the rails. Before we start, turn off the news. Seriously. In the days following 9-11 we found people who consumed more 24-hour news channel information were mor

Psychosocial aspects of having an ostomy

This past Saturday, Tiffany and I had the honor of speaking at the United Ostomy Associations of America's Regional Midwest conference. I was assigned the task of speaking to the patients, and Tiffany addressed the partners or caregivers. I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from my talk. I only had an hour for my session, and with about 100 people in the room, it was not nearly enough time. I love bullet points, so here you go: We are all different! Every ostomate is different and not one size fits all for the emotional/mental aspect either. Who had months to talk about an ostomy and weigh pros/cons? Who was this a more sudden decision for? Who had cancer? Who had IBD? Something else? Who had an ileostomy? colostomy? urostomy? Who has a temporary? Permanent? Multiple temporaries? What age where you when you got your ostomy? Under 20, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60+ Who was single when they got their ostomy? With a serious partner when they had it? Some find a stom

IBD & Medical Trauma

Medical trauma is such an under-recognized issue for the chronnically ill. It's a hard topic to talk about because it can seem like we are pointing fingers at healthcare workers. Maybe that's why there are only, now, 4 studies on the topic in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). If you are someone who treats people with IBD please know I am not here to demonize or criticize. I am both a patient and a GI psychologist. I know the medical system from both sides. I know how messed up and broken it is. But ignoring this or rationalizing it away as only affecting a few folks is wrong. So let's talk about it. Post-traumatic stress (PTS) is the term we use for medical trauma due to technicalities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTS can be less severe that full on PTSD, or it can be full on PTSD. Regardless, the symptoms are identical: Feeling hypervigilant/on-edge (increased