What To Do If You Just Found Out Your Child Has Encopresis

Here are a few basic things to do when you find out your child has encopresis. These are first steps for those looking for a place to start.

1. Visit your pediatrician and talk to them about encopresis. Get a referral for a pediatric gastroenterologist. If your pediatrician or your ped GI doesn't listen to you, or they dismiss you and tell you that your child will grow out of it, consider getting a new one. The earlier you treat and deal with encopresis the more chance of success you will have in the battle.
2. Go to Amazon and order the book "It's No Accident" by John Hodges. Have husbands, wives, grandparents and other caretakers read the book.
3. Get your child an abdominal xray. If your ped or ped GI is not doing this, insist that you want a baseline shot of your kids intestinal system.
4. Get your childs colon cleaned out. Do this under the supervision of your pediatrician or ped GI. This can be accomplished by a number of "top down" (meds) or "bottoms up" (enemas or suppositories) methods, sometimes they are used in combination. Ped GI's will have varying qualifications for clean, but you can be sure you are pretty clean if you have clear, totally liquid poop. Most doctors will not push you to that limit because it means you have to dehydrate the system. Listen to your docs here.
5. Get a follow up abdominal xray. I know it seems like a lot to get two xrays, but you will not truly know if your clean out was successful until you get an xray.
6. Keep the colon clean. This task needs an entire blog post, possibly multiple blog posts, but listen to your ped GI about the preferred method of keeping the poop moving through the body. The default choice here is usually Miralax (or PEG3350). Some will use Senna, or Fiber, or combinations of all of those.
7. Research, research, research. Join the Yahoo Encopresis support board. You can find the link here: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/encopresis_kids/

Going through these steps can take weeks, sometimes months. You don't want the above steps to take years, however, so if these things don't work and your child is still having accidents a few months down the line then you need to take further action and go deeper in the treatment options.