While there are many other important goals when it comes to treating and preventing a fecal impaction, this one that takes the highest priority because it prevents your current situation from getting worse and can help you avoid a life-threatening complication.

The damage of fecal impaction progresses through 9 stages where an initial trigger sets off a long-term bowel disorder that causes your gut tissue to continually break down to the point of eventually developing a fatal perforation.

This relentless process of damage is largely driven by inflammation and the best way to stop the underlying bowel disorder from progressing and causing a deadly perforation is to lower the inflammation in your gut right away.

Remarkably, despite this treatment goal being so vital, none of the commonly available constipation products accomplish it. In fact, some treatments (for example stimulant laxatives) may even further irritate your digestive lining and worsen your gut inflammation.

Though the damage from fecal impaction spreads from the inside of your digestive tract to the outer wall, your goal should be to first reinforce the outer wall and then repair the injury to the inner lining. This gives you the best chance at preventing a potentially lethal digestive tear.

Unfortunately, not only do most constipation products overlook this critical concern, many actually increase your risk of digestive rupture by increasing your fecal load.

Almost all laxatives try to get your stools moving by either adding water or bulk mass to your stool. This can actually push your already weakened digestive tract over its maximum ability to stretch, causing a perforated bowel, which has a very high mortality rate.

Unless your treatment effectively softens your fecal mass and makes it more malleable, your stool will either get stuck again or injure your digestive tract further down the line.

Remember, most fecal impactions occur at the site of the sigmoid colon where the large intestine is not only at its narrowest point, it also makes sharp turns there.

Simply forcing a hardened, over-sized stool further into this narrow, curvy section of your digestive tract, the way most constipation products do, is likely to make your impaction worse and increase the risk of a perforation.

Even if a treatment does succeed at forcing your wedged stool past the sigmoid colon and into the rectum, you are still likely to experience significant strain, pain and injury from pushing the fecal mass out of the anal canal.

This may lead one to think that stool softeners, lubricant laxatives or enemas might be the answer to this problem. However, research shows that these products don’t fare well either because impacted stools tend to be too hard and dry for lubrication or rehydration alone to work.

Once you’re assured that your treatment is able to reduce your gut’s inflammation, heal the digestive wall and improve the consistency of your stool, you can now safely focus on helping your stuck fecal mass break free and move out of your body.

To do this, you have to resume the normal peristaltic motions of your digestive tract that have been progressively weakening as a result of your fecal impaction. It is essential that your treatment improve the strength, duration and frequency of your digestive muscle contractions to successfully dislodge the trapped stool mass.

It is also important that this improvement in gut motility be focused on your large intestine (where fecal impactions occur) and not the small intestine (where nutrient absorption occurs).

Note that this is quite different from how most constipation products promote a bowel movement. They either rely on filling the colon with water or a gelatinous substance to trigger digestive muscle contractions or they deliberately irritate the sensitive digestive lining hoping to elicit smooth muscle spasms.

Neither of these treatment approaches works well for fecal impactions because the resulting gut muscle contractions are often too weak, short-lasting or infrequent.

Furthermore, the effect of these constipation treatments is not just focused on your large intestine and can even affect your small intestine. This can unnecessarily disrupt a part of your digestive tract that wasn’t malfunctioning in the first place.

As important as it is to help your colon have stronger, fuller contractions to move your stool past the narrow, curvy sigmoid region and into your rectum, it is equally important that you be able to push the fecal mass completely out of your rectum as well.

Fecal impaction sufferers are known to have a reduced ability to sense when their rectum is full and have poor squeeze anal pressures. Both these things combined take away your ability to have a normal, complete bowel movement.

The only way to fix this problem is to do three things:

• Reverse your internal anal sphincter (IAS) dysfunction (common during fecal impaction)
• Lower your rectal sensation threshold
• Improve your squeeze anal pressure

Doing these 3 things will not only return your rectal sensitivity back to normal so that you can sense when it’s time to “go”, it will also help you avoid embarrassing stool leakages and help you with complete rectal emptying.

Here is another perfect example of why most constipation products fail at properly treating fecal impactions. Almost none of the commonly available treatments properly address these three therapeutic goals. Even if they somehow manage to get your stools all the way to the end of your digestive tract, they often lack the ability to help you push your stools out of your body.

Once your stranded stools are able to finally move again and you regain your ability to have a proper bowel movement, it is important to continue the healing process of your gut by regenerating its protective epithelial lining.

To accomplish this, you need to do two things:

• Reverse the ischemic damage to your gut and heal any ulcerations in the digestive lining (caused by the repeated, prolonged stretching of your digestive tract by oversized stools)
• Treat the chronic colitis in your digestive tract (that often exists in the gut of fecal impaction sufferers even when there is no impacted stool present)

Both these actions combined can go a long way towards fully restoring the integrity of your digestive tract and reviving your impaired gut.

Since the focus of most constipation products is to simply encourage the movement of your stools, they ignore this essential aspect of gut healing. The reason for this incomplete approach is that these products are only designed to treat mild to moderate constipation which is quite different from a fecal impaction.

The gut of fecal impaction sufferers doesn’t just heal itself when the jammed stools finally come loose and are excreted. The inflammatory damage to the digestive lining often continues silently without showing any clear outward symptoms and the sufferer only becomes aware of the true extent of their internal injuries when something serious happens.

Indeed, research shows that 1 in 5 fecal impaction patients actually report having a normal bowel movement just before having a sudden medical emergency and are often caught off-guard by it.

This is why it is so important for your treatment to pay extra attention to repairing the sensitive lining of your gut even when your stools seem to be moving fine.

During fecal impaction, the prolonged presence of stools in your large intestine causes unhealthy bacteria to gain a foothold and throw off your gut’s overall microbial balance.

This is known as gut dysbiosis and it has two profound effects…

It causes something known as gut-brain axis dysfunction

This happens when the neuro-gut communication gets disrupted, leading to a permanent malfunctioning of your digestive tract.

And it traps your gut in a constant state of impairment which has been linked to many long-term health risks, such as:

• Premature aging
• Accelerated bone loss
• A shortened lifespan
• Poor energy levels
• Mental and emotional health issues
• Lower perceived attractiveness
• Lowered thinking abilities and poor memory
• Poor sleep quality
• Advanced muscle loss
• Poor immunity and healing

The only effective way to protect yourself from these long-term dangers of gut impairment and to reverse your neuro-gut communication is to restore your gut microbiome.

You can do this by creating an ideal internal gut environment that not only encourages beneficial bacterial growth but also promotes greater bacterial diversity.

Unfortunately, this is probably the most powerful therapeutic tool that is also the most underutilized by common constipation treatments. Most products either disregard this aspect of fecal impaction treatment altogether or try to force feed bacterial strains into an ailing gut environment that simply can’t support their growth.

One of the biggest health burdens of fecal impaction is how it can become a major encumbrance in your day-to-day life. As fecal impaction’s damage to the gut progresses, many sufferers report having to deal with embarrassing stool leakages (fecal incontinence) on an ongoing basis.

Research shows that unless fecal incontinence is treated early, it can get drastically worse with time and significantly degrade a person’s quality of life.

The same goes for the chronic discomfort that many fecal impaction sufferers feel on a regular basis, with one of the main painful symptoms being abdominal bloating and cramping.

While no treatment can be considered comprehensive unless it treats both these causes of constant distress, the over-the-counter products that do treat these issues tend to make your fecal impaction worse. Products that treat stool leakages, diarrhea and abdominal pain either slow down your bowels or promote the reabsorption of fluids from your stools. This causes the stools to become drier and move even slower, further exacerbating your situation.

A good treatment should be able to treat any fecal incontinence or digestive discomfort you may have by avoiding this faulty therapeutic approach and ensuring that your symptomatic relief doesn’t come at the cost of exacerbating your fecal impaction.

Aside from a bowel perforation, cancer is another major complication of fecal impactions that carries a high risk of mortality with it. Research shows that people who suffer from chronic constipation have a much higher prevalence of colon cancer, gallbladder cancer, breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

Fecal impaction further compounds this risk and is thought to promote these cancers through multiple pathways including:

• Prolonging your guts exposure to carcinogens in your stools
• Through the cancer-promoting effects of gut dysbiosis (bacterial imbalance)
• Subjecting your gut and the rest of your body to chronic oxidative stress

Because your body is constantly exposed to these harmful drivers of cancer, it is absolutely necessary that you neutralize them using an equally resilient approach.

One of the best ways to do that is by making sure your fecal impaction treatment includes potent cancer-fighting antioxidants. Antioxidants neutralize cancer-causing free radicals and protect your DNA from experiencing oncogenic changes.

Given that most over-the-counter products are only meant to provide short-term relief from constipation, they tend to take a very narrow view of the problem and leave out this essential component of protection from one of the most serious threats of fecal impactions.

Today, an ever-increasing volume of evidence is beginning to reveal how central a role our gut plays in influencing the function of almost every organ in our body. The digestive tract has become the new frontier in modifying the path of many diseases and influencing how we treat them.

This emerging research has not just caught the attention of academics but businesses as well that have rushed to launch products aiming to capitalize on this new trend. And while there is no shortage of therapeutic options for treating digestive issues today, this explosion of new products has somehow not translated to better outcomes for fecal impaction sufferers.

We’re finding that there have been no major improvements in either the prevalence of fecal impactions in the general population or its overall complication rate. Fecal impaction is still considered a potentially dangerous chronic condition that is poorly managed by current therapies and still carries a high risk of mortality even when prompt treatment is received during an emergency.

This is why it is more important than ever to verify a product’s claims by checking if it has passed the muster of rigorous scientific scrutiny. Remember, a product’s promises are only as believable as the clinical evidence backing it.

So, here are a few important things to look for when evaluating a fecal impaction treatment:

• The treatment should be able to point to clinical research supporting its therapeutic use
• This research conducted should be in line with ICH Good Clinical Practices (GCP)
• The studies should look at the treatment’s effectiveness specifically for fecal impactions
• The research should be carried out by an independent lab and not be funded by corporate interests
• The study should be well designed, preferably with large subject pools
• The clinical data should be published in a trusted peer-review journal
• There more published data there is, the stronger the clinical validation for the treatment

By relying on these strict evaluation guidelines, you can separate hype and marketing jargon from factual evidence and ensure that the product you’re about to try is both safe and effective.