IBS-C people-tinnitus and red eyes?

[Oceanflow]

I was just wondering if anyone suffering from constipation has problems with tinnitus? Also I notice that when I’m really jammed up , I seem to have red eyes and slightly worse vision.

I’m just wondering if there’s a connection...??

[KATRINA74]

I think you may have a point there. I suffer from the same

[casares8]

Hi yes no tinitus, but i definitely get red eyes with my constipation. Not all the time but when it is particularly bad. Very dry and stuck together in the morning and very red for a day or two

[Doggie123-UK]

I don't suffer with red eye very often, but when I am badly constipated I do have Occular migraines, mentioned this to my GP and she said it was just coincidence, yet it happens every time

[merve1]

Yes I do have tinnitus, red eyes sometimes and oscillate between C and D type IBS....

[Iesgobdafydd]

It might be worth you reading a bit about TMJD in case that is behind your tinnitus. My TMJD affects the connective tissue all round my ears (and everywhere else in my body), and it can give me stuffy-feeling ears when being pulled particularly tight, and sometimes rushing sounds or ringing sounds in my ears when it's moving. It also definitely affects the focus of my eyes, but I'm at the age where my focal distance might be changing to more longsighted anyhow so it's a bit hard to tell what's causing what. I'm not aware of it ever giving me red eyes, but it definitely causes dryness in my skin and perhaps dry eyes might somehow result in redness, I don't know. I believe my TMJD to have been the cause of my IBS, which is now pretty much gone.

[Oceanflow in reply to Iesgobdafydd]

Thanks for sharing this! I do have very bad TMJD! How did you fix yours? I’m in Canada and it’s not covered under Medicare... but it sounds like it’s worth fixing if I can find out what kind of doctor will fix it.

[Iesgobdafydd in reply to Oceanflow]

My TMJD isn't fixed yet, my IBS is fixed I think though and I'm working on the TMJD. I think what I'm doing is going to work eventually, but it's been two years now and the fatigue and aches and pains I get from it are still very much with me so it's not a quick fix. However there are strong indications it is helping because my general health is much much better, I'm not getting every virus that passes within two metres of me any more and I'm not needing to spend whole days in bed like I was. My skin oils have returned in some places where it had been very dry, my concentration is a little better, I don't get oedema any more when the weather's warm - there are lots of small improvements.

It's been suggested to me (by a retired practitioner) that a cranio-sacral therapist would be able to speed up my recovery but I haven't tried it so don't know if it's true, I've also heard there are medications that might help and that a rheumatologist would be the right kind of standard medical specialist to be referred to, but I haven't tried that either.

What I'm doing may be slow but it is free at least. I started out thinking what I had was some kind of problem with how I physically reacted to stress, because the IBS specialist was so adamant that the cause of my IBS must be stress. I thought I must be somehow storing it in my body, that my muscles weren't relaxing properly somewhere but staying tight. I was fascinated to see the other day when someone posted about a condition where that is exactly what happens. I'd never heard of TMJD, so had no idea that might be a cause.

So what I thought I'd try was what we used to do at the end of yoga classes, as the most relaxing thing I knew. If you haven't done it, basically they get you to lie down flat on your back and talk you slowly round relaxing each part of your body in turn. It's about focussing your awareness on each one particular part of your body, and getting it to relax if it's tense - just having the awareness there tends to do that for me. So I tried that, and to make a long story short, I discovered that if I followed the sensations down through the base of my tongue, there was a lot of discomfort down there somewhere, so that was one of my main routes to finding problem areas early on was trying to trace where the pain and discomfort in my body was coming from, become more aware of it, and relax the muscles that might be causing it. That actually seemed to have some effect and I'm still not entirely sure why, but over time I discovered that pulling on particular muscles near the area where the pain or numbness was was more effective. Often pumping them was what worked best rather than just tightening them and keeping them tightened. Sometimes early on I just had no idea where I needed to work next, and just guessed. Sometimes I tried "pressing" or "bearing down" on a place where it felt there was numbness or discomfort, which I now think of as a "stuck" knot of connective tissue which needs to be pulled on to be untangled. I don't know if that's really what's happening, but using that mental model of what's going on seems to work. Sometimes pressing on that bit didn't seem to work, and what worked was using another muscle nearby that I guess pulled on it sideways instead of the way that didn't work.

After a while someone mentioned TMJD on here and as soon as I read about it I was pretty sure that was what I had. I talked with my dentist about it and they recommended some jaw exercises, but I just stuck with what I was doing already.

Early on, it was all locked up so tight, it was really hard to get anything to free up, it felt like I was yanking and yanking on things and they moved so slowly. I would get creaking or scrunching sounds when it was moving, and sometimes sudden tastes and smells, it was like a bit of mucus was trapped and then suddenly released tasting salty. Later when it started flowing faster, sometimes I could feel the fluid returning to somewhere it had been cut off, it was an amazing feeling.

Now when I work on it, it feels like long strands (of connective tissue) are spinning and unwinding inside me, but I've no idea if that's really what was happening or not as I haven't read much about the biology of the condition. Also as time goes by it feels like not only is everything moving faster and easier, but instead of yanking away at a single bit, I can feel that by stretching or pulling at one joint or knot I'm actually pulling on several or many all at once, and they're all being freed up simultaneously. Lying down in bed is still my preferred place to work on it, but with everything a bit looser than it was, it's also possible to work on it in many other positions, and having become very aware of the sensations that tight connective tissue causes, and the sounds it gives as it frees up and as it flows, and the sensations associated with that, I tend to carry on working away on it at least a bit whatever I'm doing during the day. I could also tell that the yoga I was doing for a while with my daughter was helpful. Sitting on the toilet also seems to be a great position for getting connective tissue moving, maybe because those muscles that are usually busy holding things in tightly are relaxed for once. Alternating between lying down for a while and then getting up for a bit also seems to be helpful, as it all gets pulled into a different shape which puts pressure in new places without any conscious effort.

There were occasional times when this work I was doing resulted in my being in more pain for a while. My dentist had warned me I might need a lot of ibuprofen, but I never used painkillers I just kept working on it till it got better. There were also a couple of times when the pressure in my throat or gut from the connective tissue made me nauseous, but thankfully it didn't happen often or last very long.

Sorry for the length of this and that it's not a more precise set of how-to instructions. If you just want a simple easy thing to try then you could google search for TMJ disorder jaw exercises and will probably find something helpful to get started with for free. There is also a book Taking Control of TMJ which I bought online secondhand cheap, and it had some simple jaw exercises that were only supposed to take a few minutes a day and doing that much was supposed to keep people's TMJD under control. I didn't want to control mine, I wanted to cure it, but I don't know for sure if that will be possible or not.

[Oceanflow]

Did you have an expert look at your TMJD? Or did you see a chiropractor?