Male with prolapse issues - I think - Need your kind help

Hi maleissues,
From my experience in working with people with bowel issues has me wondering about your pancreas and/or blockage in the bowels. Problems with the pancreas can cause the stool to be lighter in color or even white depending on how affected the pancreas is. Blockage or tumors in the abdomen can cause a pencil thin stool. It could be other things, of course, but getting those checked out might be a good idea. Have the doctors tested you for the possibility?
As to the possibility of rectocele, I think I have heard of men having them, but I don't know anything about that, but men are suppose to also benefit from the same posture we do on this site.
Wish you the best, and that some valuable answers come along.

It does sound like your bowels have been through the ringer. Have you had a nutritionist work on a diet with you that would suit your current issues? Sometimes putting in or eliminating certain foods can really help. Have you had your natural bacteria count tested? You may not have enough natural bacteria left in your gut so it can do its job correctly. I have heard of fecal transplants that are used on some occasions. As to probiotics, some people believe in those, but I took them for years with no positive results. I really prefer fermented foods, but I don't know how any of this would affect you.
If you start reading information from the tool bar, you can start to get a good idea of what the posture is all about, otherwise you could get a consult from Christine to sort all this out.

Yes, slouching is bad for all of us! I can tell you the basics of the posture we use, but more study or advice from a male perspective would be best. We stand with feet straight, knees straight but not locked or bowed back, relax belly but do not push it out, shoulders down but not back, chest lifted up but not out. Neck is lifted up with chin slightly tucked. We try to hold this posture not matter what we are doing and it helps us with our prolapse issues, hips and spines.
Are you thinking you have a rectocele, pouching of the rectum? The women can tell they have this, because the rectum pouches into the vaginal space. Not sure where this would be in male anatomy, or how you would temporarily relieve the symptoms during a bowel movement the way we do.
Like I said, this is way beyond my physiological understanding.

Hello MI,

Thank you for writing in and yes, I think we will be able to give you a few ideas.

We have had several women come to the forums over the years with symptoms like yours. When I was a hospital nurse I also worked with men and women who had long-standing serious bowel disease. I too used to have terrible bowel issues as a child, worsening into my teenage years. Luckily, I came to a high quality diet early on in my twenties, which I’m sure saved me in many ways.

We have had women describe the same pasty, thin stools. In some cases it was found to be caused by food allergies - particularly to wheat and dairy. My guess is that you have gone round and round with such diet experiments. When I read that someone is taking probiotics and other supplements trying to cure a very ill gut, I shake my head because from my perspective the bowel needs to be healed at a much deeper level.

Everything about how we digest and absorb our food has to do with the bacterial colonies in the gut. There is a tremendous amount of information about lactic acid producing microorganisms normalizing the surface area of the bowel. So of course, probiotics are all the rage. But I don’t think swallowing a capsule of dried laboratory-manufactured bacteria is remotely the same as doing the delicate work of growing your own local, live species and consuming them on a daily basis.

I just tried to find my copies of Ann Wigmore’s books, but they’re buried somewhere on the shelf. Try to get ahold of her Hippocrate’s Diet or a little book called Why Suffer? Here she describes how she makes “Rejuvelac”, the easiest and probably best way to heal a diseased gut. She simply ferments wheat seeds for two or three days and then drinks the water, which has been cultured by friendly lactobacilli. We all live in a sea of life-giving microorganisms just ready to make us well. This is like being on an IV drip of the highest and most pure medicine you can imagine. Anything problematic in the wheat is completely broken down by the lactobacilli. I hope you will do this, because it sounds to me like you are a candidate for future bowel surgery - which is anything but curative.

The imaging tests you are going through are based on a faulty perception of human anatomy. As you have probably read already here, it is a fact that you do not have a pelvic floor, but rather a muscular wall behind you. In women, the path of least resistance for intraabdominal pressure is the vagina. Since the front half of the pelvic diaphragm is closed off in men, you are more susceptible to rectal prolapse, or a condition called intussusception, where the bowel lining telescopes or slides down on itself. Pencil thin stools are a symptom of this. The “pelvic floor descent” they describe is really a bulging at the back wall. All their treatments are based on anatomical misconception. This is where the Whole Man work comes in.

Humans are not designed to chronically hold in their abdominal wall, yet this is extraordinarily common in our culture. You don’t even have to try to hold it in, but it automatically pulls in when lumbar curvature is flattened. The lumbar spine flattens through all the ways we sit, stand, and exercise in modern culture. And, we very easily reverse natural breathing when our natural posture is distorted. Normally, when you breathe in, your entire abdominal wall should move forward. When you breathe out, your belly should passively fall back. Almost everyone has reversed this by adulthood. It is this breathing under the forces of gravity that moves the abdominal and pelvic organs forward into their anatomic positions. The stomach, liver, and intestines have ample room so all the organs that move fluid through the body sit at right angles to their channels. This protects us from prolapse and urinary incontinence, but it also protects against such things as acid reflux and hiatal hernia, which is literally when part of the stomach gets sucked up the pipe. The pipe (esophagus) should be at a right angle to a forward-placed stomach. Your sigmoid colon should be at a right angle to your rectum.

When you’re either pulled in or slouched over, your guts are jammed to the back of your abdomen and pelvis. The rectum not only loses its support, but is impinged on by the intestines. Thus the pencil-thin stools.

To illustrate my point, have a look at Joseph Pilates as an old man click here. From a cultural perspective, we think he looks pretty great and buff. But from a Whole Woman perspective, he is quite deformed. All the decades of severe abdominal work have reversed what the natural forces of intraabdominal pressure have been trying to do with every breath. His tightly held belly has rotated his hips outward, has chronically bent his knees, and has rotated his shoulders inward. In reality, he has the structure of a non-human primate and I would be very surprised if he weren’t suffering from knee and hip pain.

Now look at this classic view of our founding fathers click here. Every single one of those men are pulled up into Whole Man posture. Their abdominal walls are held out by a strongly lifted chest. Their chins are held in and down in natural human posture. Were they trying to do this? Of course not…it just happens while living and breathing naturally under the forces of gravity. They chopped their own wood and did not have soft couches and chairs to spend hours reclining in. What was once utterly natural, we now must bring into conscious awareness.

No matter what the extent of your bowel problem, you need to naturalize your gut from within and without. There is a good demonstration of Whole Woman posture (which is also Whole Man posture) on YouTube.

Another pillar of this work is never straining against the toilet seat again. All you have to do is plant your feet firmly on the floor and lift your bottom slightly off the seat whenever you need to raise pressure. This will align your rectum into its anatomic position for emptying. When you sit and strain against the seat, you cause back pressure that literally blows the organs toward the pelvic outlet.

Please understand that conventional medicine does not consider gut health within a wider framework of reference than surgery, drugs, and kegel exercises with a PT.

Wishing you well,

Christine

Thanks so much, Christine for stepping in!!! As always, such a great wealth of information!!!

I've been in the midst of an internet outage all day, and I'm just now seeing this awesome thread. Maleissues, do adopt this posture. Relaxing the belly is the hardest thing to re-learn if you have been sucking things in tight for decades like so many of us have. I started this work almost 4 years ago and I was probably into my second year when I could stay in posture without constant reminders to myself. Once it becomes automatic, it changes so many things about how you feel. Glad you found us; I think you will agree, Christine can point you in the right direction. - Surviving

Just looked up the recipe for rejuvelca. I am definitely trying this one!! It might even be better than my fermented beet kvass. We will see!! Thanks again, Christine!!

Well, you seem to be deeply steeped in the medical paradigm and so of course it is difficult for you to see how destructive so many of the treatments are. Don’t any alarms go off when you hear the term “redundant colon”? They certainly do for us, because we’ve so often heard a similar term, “redundant vagina”, and understand it to be an old, outdated perspective. This is not to say the colon can’t become hugely stretched and lax, a catastrophic condition. Please understand that Miralax is likely contributing greatly to your bloating and feelings of anxiety. It is a terrible drug. The mind/body is one perceptual being and your gut is screaming to your subconscious mind for help.

I have witnessed women who have consented to rectal suspension (rectopexy) only to develop permanent, intractable high constipation (paralysis) and now must manually remove feces - for the rest of their lives! One wonders at what point a colostomy bag would be preferable. Then there is the pain and dysfunction from inevitable scar tissue and adhesions. Surgery is usually anything but curative.

I agree about the futility of squatting all the way down, as is often recommended. Unless you can hold a full lumbar curvature, this closes your pelvic wall and makes less room for evacuation. When you lean forward into the half-squat I described, you are dropping your intestines into your lower belly and relieving pressure on your rectum. Don’t worry about reasonable pushing in this position. All animals have to push BMs out.

I would hope you could begin to think about your condition as dynamic, rather than some set-in-stone anatomical problem that could be diagnosed and treated through imaging studies and surgery. What is folded and crimped today may be open and fluid tomorrow.

Ann Wigmore’s brilliant work was developed for people like you who have been harmed by industrial food (I’m guessing here) and medicine. She herself (she is long-since deceased) must have been quite ill, as she taught and treated herself in such radical ways in response to her own symptoms. She grew wheat grass, ground it, and placed the pulp in her rectum for hours at a time. She swore at its healing properties and developed a huge following of her deeply healing ways. I believe this level of emergency response is what is needed in a case like yours. There is nothing the medical system can offer you, as they truly do not know how to bring you back to health. Until you can internalize this you are risking everything. Yearly CT scans and colonoscopies?

I cannot give you specific instructions, because we all respond differently to food. But if it were me I would start with something like short grain brown rice and raw butter. George Ohsawa, who brought macrobiotics to the planet, saw many cures initiated with brown rice alone. Perhaps you could later add a very few stewed prunes. I’m just guessing here (maybe your gut won’t tolerate rice or prunes) but trying to help you see the drastic diet changes necessary for an ill gut such as yours. I would not take any supplements, not even magnesium. We grow and juice barley grass - an extremely nourishing food filled with magnesium and omega 3 fatty acid. The gut needs natural foods and that’s why I think Ann’s ideas will be helpful.

The fact that your puborectalis muscle isn’t relaxing completely suggests chronic tightness in your pelvic floor. This is extremely common and related to a habitually tucked tailbone. You don’t have to have six pack abs to have this very common postural problem. Before WW there has never been a distinction made between a low, sharp lumbosacral angle and the wide-radius curvature of WW posture. It is all called “sway back”. Posture may sound insignificant, but it is what gives our organs the room to function properly.

Hope this has given you something to work with.

Christine

I'd like to put in my plug for you to really work hard on some dietary measures. Some months ago, my husband went completely off gluten, and not long after, eliminated dairy. Virtually every digestive issue that he had, went away, as did several other seemingly unrelated things. He does not preach, but as he points out, anyone can give these things up for a week or two, and that's all it takes to see a difference, which each person can then judge for him or herself.

I mean completely. Cutting back on these things doesn't do much, if you have a true sensitivity.

Also please be aware that conventional PT follows the anatomically flawed medical model of the pelvic floor. I'm not sure if the impact of this is any different, when it's a man receiving the PT. - Surviving

Great to hear, MI. To add to your healing path, take a look at Bruce Lipton's amazing work, outlined in his revolutionary book, The Biology of Belief. You can also find him on YouTube. Be well! C.

Yes try going off dairy and you will find you will feel a lot better. It's hard but non dairy foods taste good when you get used to them. It's better to feel well than ill.

I have seen men on TV shows with rectal problems and of course men have problems too. I had problems when I took Lomotil. I didn't have any problems before that. Well I think it was the lomotil. I had a pain in my back and terrible bowel problems when I took these tabs. I am 67 years now and I have lived with my prolapse since I took lomoti when I was in my fifties. I am always wondering what caused my prolapse. I blame Lomotil a lot.

Was just getting ready to make my rejuvelca, and found that I had the wrong wheat berries!!! I bought the hard red wheat berries. The recipe calls for soft white wheat berries. I also read that this is important, that the hard red just doesn't work, so for those who who are interested in making this drink and don't want to make the same mistake "soft spring white wheat berries"

Maleissues,
You have been such an inspiration with your honesty and frankness. I have recently also cut out the dairy, for over a week now, and have noticed quite a difference in my bowels and overall feeling in my body. I have always known that I was becoming more and more lacto intolerant, but just loved cheese so much, I didn't care. Your journey is helping me to revisit my own, and I thank you for that!!

Hi MI,

Just lean forward, lifting your weight slightly off the seat. Think of your tailbone lifting up. Your leg muscles will strengthen over time, but understand that you don't need to stay there and hover. Just lift your weight off when you are pushing.

I do believe gluten will not be a problem with rejuvelac, as the lactobacilli break down the protein into amino acids that are easily absorbed by the gut.

Christine

Having always had problems with constipation since I was a young child I have done some research on ways to help with it. Sometimes constipation and diarrhea can be caused by parasitic infections. We can get parasites from our pets, unwashed vegetables and uncooked meats. There is a book by Hulda Clark called A Cure for All Cancers. It was her belief that parasites caused cancer and that eliminating the parasites cured the cancer. I was surprised to learn that I had them and according to her book most people have some parasite.
I just thought you might look at that angle to eliminate (no pun intended) that as a cause for bowel problems.
Blessed Herbs has a detoxification kit that works well to regulate the bowels. It contains bentonite clay which helps to remove old fecal matter off the walls of the colon.
Just wanted to share my information about products that have helped me.

Some years ago when I was a newbie here, I purchased a colon cleansing herbal supplement at the suggestion of one of our then members. The idea appealed to me, but I never got up the nerve to take any. My bowels at the time were very unpredictable (they have calmed down somewhat since then, most of the time at least!) and I feared I would need to take several days off work just in case something strange happened. i'll never know..... - Surviving

I should have added that you will have to take a few days off of work to do a program like colon cleansing but once you have done one the energy you feel is amazing. Having a prolapse sometimes make it harder for women to have a bowel movement and they have to manually push it out. My gynecologist says some of her prolapse patients have to do this. The objective is not to strain.
I sometimes wonder if we are supposed to push so hard when we have a baby. Also in a gynecological exam we are told to push when being examined with that awful, cold instrument they use to examine with.
Being in my 60's I have come to Christine's program later in life, but am grateful to have found it. She has devoted her life to this and she truly cares about her work, that really comes through. Good choice to have Surviving 60 as a moderator for this forum.

I used to work with a gal that co-owned a clinic where they actually did deep colon cleanses. She swore by it, but I was always doubtful of the long term affect. To me, going for regular colon cleanses seems to mask underlying problems. I like to think the body can heal itself if given the right environment. As far as bowels go, I really believe putting the right food in and getting rid of foods that irritate the system can be very helpful. I have been reading more and more about fermented foods the last couple of years, and am finding that it really makes sense. Fermenting has gone on for so long before modern manufacturing took over. These are lost arts that were used to keep foods for longer with the obvious by product of good gut health in the form of the healthy bacteria that we have been losing by our modern diets. I remember seeing those old crocks in some of my relatives homes when I was a kid. I always wondered what they were for...

Maleissues,
A lot of times I will start my hover over the toilet with my elbows or mid forearm, I should say, just above my knees for balance. I usually do this as I feel a bowel movement coming on. As it gets closer, I then lower closer to the seat in whole woman posture. I have developed pretty strong leg muscles for hovering with the whole woman exercises and walking. But, it did take time and practice to do it. I was hovering too well a few times and made a mess on the seat! TMI! But necessary, I think as a description. I really like the position my rectum is in now. It feels like it is in right position finally, but then I had a uterus resting on it too! Besides that though, the posture work and hovering helped a lot.

Maleissues said that he has been getting a colonscopy every year, and based on my experience getting it once, I can easily see where that whole prepping process would really do a number on your system especially if done over and over. How could the good bacteria ever get re-established, even with the best diet in the world? - Surviving

I have heard of fecal transplants for people with severely depleted healthy bacteria, but I don't know if maleissues falls in this category or not. It could be a slow process to building the healthy bacteria back into the gut, but I think in the right environment, they can.
Our modern day diets are continually depleting the good bacteria out of our bowels, and I think we need to get back to the basics of good whole foods and proper preparation of them. Our health really does begin there. I saw enough people in the nursing homes and hospice with impacted bowels and cancers to believe that this is true.