Digestive diseases tend to fly under the radar when it comes to people’s health concerns. But without a healthy, functioning digestive tract, you can’t properly absorb and use nutrients from your food or eliminate toxins.
Cancers that affect your colon and rectum, such as colorectal cancer, claim more than 50,000 lives per year in the United States. However, other digestive diseases – such as inflammatory bowel disease, and relatively minor conditions, including diverticulitis or pelvic floor dysfunction – create a burden, too.
Our experts at Colon and Rectal Surgeons of Greater Hartford help you make lifestyle adjustments to improve your digestion and may prescribe medications, too. More severe conditions may need minor outpatient surgical procedures at our offices in Bloomfield, South Windsor, and Plainville, Connecticut, or robotic surgery in a hospital setting.
How do you know when your digestive problems need surgical intervention? Following are a few signs.
If you have colorectal cancer, you may benefit from lifestyle changes, such as a whole-foods diet and more exercise. However, lifestyle changes aren’t sufficient to cure your cancer or save your life. Neither is the latest fad medication highlighted on the internet.
When we diagnose cancer in your colon or rectum, we may remove the cancers ourselves either on the spot (i.e., during colonoscopy) or during a scheduled robotic surgical procedure in the hospital. We also refer you to an oncologist for further treatment.
Don’t delay surgery if you’re diagnosed with a digestive cancer. Your life is literally on the line.
Except in the case of cancer, we usually start with lifestyle interventions to improve whatever colorectal condition you present with. Diet and exercise may be enough to improve the early stages of:
If lifestyle changes don’t help, or if your initial presentation is severe enough, we may prescribe medications to help you digest and process your food more comfortably. Some options include:
However, if you don’t respond to these treatments, you may need to undergo surgery.
If your life is in danger, or if other therapies haven’t given you relief and you’re at risk for continued pain or dangerous weight loss, you need surgery. When your digestive tract is severely inflamed, and nothing can tone it down or repair the damage, surgery is the only option and the best one for your continued health and well-being.
At Colon and Rectal Surgeons of Greater Hartford, we recommend a minimally invasive surgical approach called robotic surgery. Your expert surgeon uses miniaturized surgical tools that they insert into the areas of interest via small incisions and then control, by hand, on a computer console.
Robotic surgery is preferable to traditional open surgery because it uses smaller incisions, which causes less bleeding and trauma. Robotic surgery reduces the risk for infections and blood loss. It also takes a shorter time to recover from robotic surgery than open surgery.
Just as we try to start with lifestyle interventions first, we also will perform the least invasive surgical procedure that’s appropriate to your condition. If you have ulcerative colitis, colon cancer, or another disease or condition that’s destroyed part of your intestines, we may be able to perform a primary bowel resection.
In a primary bowel resection, we remove the diseased portion of your colon or rectum, and then rejoin the healthy sections. After you heal, you should be able to move your bowels normally.
However, if too much of your colon or rectum has been destroyed or is too inflamed to function, a primary bowel resection may not be appropriate. In such cases, we create a hole in your abdomen called a stoma. We then attach a colostomy bag to the stoma to collect feces.
A stoma and colostomy bag allows your colon and rectum to rest. If the inflammation subdues, we may be able to reverse the colostomy.
If you suspect that your digestive problems require surgical intervention, contact our expert team for an evaluation by calling our office nearest you (Bloomfield, South Windsor, or Plainville, Connecticut) or by contacting us online today.
