32 Years of IBS — and What Finally Worked

I am aged 42 and I was suffering from IBS for around 32 years. I have never-ending stories to share on this.

I tried homoeopathy, ayurveda, and allopathy without significant success. The night before travelling long distance was always nightmare-ish to me.

I tried to find people who had similar problems. I was astonished and oddly happy to discover that people like John F. Kennedy, Rahul Dravid, and even Rabindranath Tagore had a disturbed stomach. Being happy did not help me solve the problem. Rather, it motivated me to sleep with it.

Being a sport aficionado, I came across a book  "Serve to Win" by Novak Djokovic and understood that a gluten-intolerant person can emerge as world-class if he follows the right diet. It is not that he needs to stay without food. Again, this story helped me survive, but it was not something that helped me on a consistent basis to live life to the fullest.

I was accompanied by Rifagut 400 in my travel kit.

On the first weekend, I dialled one of my friends Dr Abhijit Das and he suggested a few nearby places to visit.

Sitting at the Alan Turing Museum, I was planning my coming weekends' travel and thinking about how many Rifagut strips were at my disposal.

I visited some beautiful places in the UK with some fascinating people who are and will be with me a bit longer than the rest.But I was accompanied by the my oldest friend IBS too....

Despite the beautiful surroundings, IBS was always there — the constant mental arithmetic of how far the nearest bathroom was, how long until the next stop, whether today would be a good day or a bad one.

I came back to India and my IBS geared up. Then a Netflix documentary drew my attention — Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut. It had a kind of wow effect on me.

I immediately changed my breakfast menu and replaced whatever I used to have with oats. A nice beginning — I started to feel good, but the psychological impact remained untouched.

I shared the same Netflix link with Abhijit and he called me immediately, wanting to know my full IBS history. He wanted to try a hypnotherapy session — a trance. I did not have any other choice but to accept his proposal. I was desperate to come out of that phase.

Then we had our first session. That was my first experience of gut-focused hypnotherapy trance. Gradually I found the key to control my IBS systems and suddenly realized - I can live as happy life as I can think to live.

The trance state left me feeling good, but I wasn't fully convinced it would hold up against real pressure. Still, I decided to take the chance.

That year happened to be the Mahakumbh Mela — the one that, by tradition, comes around only once every 144 years. Missing it felt like it would cost me more than attending it would. The catch: it was 1,000 km and a 15-hour drive from home, and I was the only one in the group who could drive.

I took the risk anyway. We did the round trip — there and back — in 50 hours. I came back ecstatic, not just about having gone, but about what it proved: hypnotherapy wasn't just a nice feeling in the room. It held up on the road.

Later that same year, a winter trip to Jharkhand — a 3:30 am start, and for once, nothing to think about.