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Colon cancer prevention guide

Step 4. Maintain regularity

If you are concerned about irregularity, you are more likely to get a referral to a psychiatrist than gastroenterologist. Your desire for having regular stools — meaning daily, complete, and effortless  — is actually considered an “obsessive-compulsive” disorder.

I am not making this up. To protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits, doctors follow the established treatment protocols. These protocols are taught in medical schools, graduated programs, continuous education courses, and prescribed by the leading medical references. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy is the de facto “standard of care” reference manual for most Western doctors [link]:

Merck Manual Constipation

According to Merck, only after not moving bowels for more than three consecutive days, do you become a bona fide “sicko,” finally entitled for treatment with fiber, laxatives, or both. Soon enough, this farce leads to irreversible bowel disorders, that invariably precede colorectal cancer.

If you indeed “don't worry about a thing” until the fourth day,  this means that you are already affected by some or all of the following four pathologies:

(1) Your stools range from type 1 to 3; (2) You already are or will soon become dependent on fiber or laxatives to move your bowels; (3) You are suffering from dysbacteriosis, and (4) You may no longer experience urge sensation, essential for regular (daily) defecation.

If you ignore these conditions,  your risk of irreversible bowel disorders and colon cancer increase with the duration of irregularity.

True, in a literal sense, you don't have to have daily stools. In fact, some people go without a bowel movement for weeks at a time simply because the colon has a large holding capacity. But this doesn't mean that it is good, healthy, or normal. It simply means that your colon is no longer sensitive to small amounts of normal stool, and requires more enlarged stools to initiate defecations.

As the pattern of irregularity commences,  first you are moving your bowels every other day, next, it is every second day, next — every third, and so it goes on all the way to impaction, obstruction, diarrhea, inflammation, polyps, ulcers, lesions, and cancer.

To restore regularity and/or to overcome the loss of urge sensation when it is “beyond repair,”  review the Restoring Anorectal Sensitivity section, and follow the recommendations in all of the prior steps.