What can blood in the stool indicate, why are the legs the pump of our body and who gets sick more often – men or women?
Proctologist, surgeon at the Fomin Clinic in Tver, member of the Russian Society of Colorectal Surgeons Ilya Kochkin answered the most naive questions about hemorrhoids for Zdorov’ Mail.ru.
This is true. If you work as a truck driver or sit at a computer all day, then the likelihood of developing hemorrhoids increases.
The thing is that with a sedentary lifestyle there is constant stagnation of blood in the pelvis. In simple terms: legs are the body’s pump, and if we sit for a long time, this pump does not work. So if your job involves sitting for a long time, take a break and walk for 5-10 minutes at least once every 2 hours.
2. If there is blood coming from the anus, is it definitely hemorrhoids?
Of course, most often the cause of blood in the stool is hemorrhoids, but this is not the only disease in which there is blood in the stool.
Blood can be present in various pathologies: anal fissure, polyps and even colon tumors. Therefore, self-medication is not the best choice if blood appears in the stool from time to time.
The sooner you contact a specialist, the greater the chance of avoiding surgery or minimizing intervention.
3. Do women get hemorrhoids more often because they give birth?
This is not entirely true, although pregnancy and childbirth do indeed quite often provoke the first occurrence of hemorrhoids. But in general, in percentage terms, both women and men suffer almost equally.
4. Is it possible to cure hemorrhoids with folk remedies – suppositories and ointments?
Doubtful, and suppositories and ointments are not yet folk medicine. Folk medicine is cabbage leaves and potatoes (yes, we hear this from patients!).
And it’s not even that these remedies are useless, sometimes they really help. But hemorrhoids have various manifestations, including thrombosis or bleeding. And for each specific case, their own ointments and suppositories are good. But their incorrect use can only worsen the situation.
So I do not recommend self-medication.
5. Are hemorrhoids a disease only for older people?
This is not entirely true. Hemorrhoids are a disease of working age, most often people aged 45-60 suffer from it, and with age the number of people suffering from it decreases.
Hemorrhoids most often occur due to an unhealthy lifestyle – sedentary, when a person practically does not get up from a chair the entire working day, or when a person is engaged in heavy physical labor. And of course, when you do not seek help at the first unpleasant symptoms.