Red Wine and your Colon

Billington Imports has a generous collection of links to articles on wine and health. Finding this on the heels of a recent WebMD article regarding red wine and colon cancer, it is a welcomed page. Lately, I've been drinking more red wine than white, and I've completely cut beer out of my diet all together. How do I feel? Good. Better. Really good. There might be something to this whole red wine thing, after all.

Colitis by Numbers: Our Mission Statement

I take as my starting point a simple premise: more than most strange and esoteric illnesses which plague people daily, Colitis is one that can be brought to bearable-ness based on numbers. This idea is not new; as children we know a few basic things about sickness: when the thermometer is above 99 degrees Fahrenheit, we can probably stay home from school; if you weigh more than 115 pounds, you were no longer able to play in pee-wee football; curfew was 10pm on a school night; we drive at 16, marry at 18, drink at 21, can afford auto-insurance at 25 and retire at 65, and so on.

In a society as grounded in numbers as ours, it seems a simple enough proposition that the ineffable illnesses of Crohn's Disease and Colitis may be slightly illuminated by this same rudimentary reasoning.

As little as doctors actually know (and I'm married to one, it is quite little) about Colitis, there is a basic scheme we are able to follow -- all of us, young, old, female, Jewish, white, holistic healers and medical traditionalists. And this is where my reasoning differs with the doctors -- everyone is different, but the numbers remain (relatively) the same.

Therefore, what you will find here, you may borrow en masse to understand better your illness, or a family member's, or a friend's. This blog offers no cures; just as a guide to mountain climbing alone won't help you summit Long's Peak but will highlight trails and tricks, this site will highlight trails and tricks. It might even help you into remission, but it will not allow you to "summit" your chronic illness. As of this writing, there is no cure for Colitis. There are, however, a set of numbers we all should know.