When it comes to our digestive function, timing is everything. The muscles in our gut have to work in perfect coordination to ensure that the digested material spends just the right amount of time in each specialized region of our intestines.

That’s how nutrients get to every single one of the trillions of cells in our body. That’s how we stay alive.

If something were to throw off the timing of our GI muscle contractions, it would essentially disrupt this crucial lifeline our body needs to survive.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the 11 initial causes mentioned above do – they disrupt the function of your colon by slowing it down. It may seem like a small thing but as you’re about to see, a slowdown in your colon can be devastating for its tissue and your overall life.

Your colon tissue is very sensitive to interruptions. It can only handle very short-term slowdowns before a problem turns into a permanent condition.

The smooth muscles that wrap around the entire length of our large intestine (colon) need to contract fully and contract often to stay healthy. However, the 11 causes mentioned above low your colonic function for so long that it develops into something called a functional bowel disorder.

Now your situation has gone from a temporary issue to a long-term problem. Your gut has now become permanently sluggish and the smooth muscles around your colon have much weaker, less frequent contractions.

The problem now has taken on a life of its own and stopping it is no longer a matter of just treating the initial cause.

The biggest problem with having a long-term bowel disorder is that the process of damage never stops.

By this point your colon function has become so slow that stool moves through it at a snail’s pace.

• The slower your stool moves, the bigger it gets. The bigger the stool gets,
• the more it pushes against the gut’s sensitive inner lining.
• The more your stool pushes against the sensitive inner lining, the more it cuts off the blood flow within your colon.

In essence, your colon tissue starts experiencing something called ischemia and gets starved for oxygen.

Your gut starts breaking down from the inside-out. The sensitive inner lining develops ulcerations and the growing stool starts to stretch the colon so tight that its outer walls begin to falter.

Your chances of a perforation go up significantly and your colon remains in a chronically inflamed state.

Note how the initial cause that triggered this slow decline of your colon has been replaced by other driving factors. Treating the problem now is not just a matter of targeting the initial cause, your treatment approach now has to be a lot more comprehensive.

Stools that don’t move are a glaring sign that your digestive tract has become so weak and impaired that a health emergency is imminent.

The damage of fecal impaction tends to be relentless and progresses through 9 stages. With each stage, the problem becomes exponentially more dangerous and considerably harder to treat. Your chances of serious complications go up and your risk of mortality increases.

What’s worse, in these later stages your gut gets trapped in a self-sustaining cycle of damage. In other words, your condition is no longer being propelled by the original cause that started your digestive disorder in the first place. A new disease has now taken over and is spearheading you towards a catastrophe.

The only way to break this cycle and reverse the disease at this point is to go beyond the just the initial cause and employ an aggressive and broad treatment approach.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t identify and treat the cause that first triggered the start of your bowel slowdown.

You certainly should.

Treating the initial causes will take away some of the steam from the disease process but it will not stop the progression of the disease.

For example, a diet low in fiber and water might have been your initial trigger that first slowed your digestive function. However, by the time you develop a functional bowel disorder and have a fecal impaction, simply increasing your fiber and water intake will not undo all the damage that may have been caused to your colon.

To truly overcome your fecal impaction problem, you don’t just want your stuck stool to move again, you also have to address many other urgent issues at the same time:

• You have to restore the nerve signaling between your gut and your brain so that it can resume normal peristaltic motions
• You have to reestablish the healthy bacterial balance that has been thrown off by your stalled stool
• You have to heal the gut tissue lining and strengthen the weakened colon walls
• You have to reduce the inflammation in your digestive tract and resume blood flow within it

Note how just treating the original cause (low fiber, water) would do nothing to address any of these crucial issues. All in all, there are 10 important things you have to address to properly treat your fecal impaction and reverse the damage it has already done to your digestive system.

Unless you target every single one of these 10 things, your treatment will be ineffective, your condition will continue to worsen and your stools will get impacted again.

One reason why the mortality rate for fecal impactions is so high is because from the time the initial cause triggers a digestive malfunction to the point where the colon begins to shut down, the sufferer remains largely unaware of all the damage that has taken place inside them.

The very nature of our digestive tract makes it hard for us to detect serious problems with our colon. Our intestines simply aren’t meant to be sensory organs, so issues with our gut tend to only be caught in the late stages. This underscores why a fecal impaction should be considered as an ever-present health threat no matter what your symptoms suggest. It also points to how an alert patient can prevent a health emergency by catching a major problem before it happens.

So next, let’s take a look at the mortality rates of fecal impaction and see why it’s not just the sufferers but even doctors that can be caught off-guard by sudden life-threatening complications in patients undergoing medical treatment.