Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional

advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider.

And now on to the show. Welcome to Helix Talk episode 102. I'm your co-host, Dr. Kane.

I'm Dr. Patel, and with us today, we have our guest contributor, Dr.

Shrewastava. Thank you for joining us again. Thanks for having me.

And today's episode is entitled, When the Squatty Potty isn't enough, drug therapy for chronic,

idiopathic constipation. Dr. Shravastva, we've brought you on to this podcast episode as a

content expert in constipation.

So welcome. Thank you. So maybe we can start off today's episode with kind of a simple patient

case to kind of set the groundwork for what we're talking about because CIC or chronic

idiopathic constipation isn't your just run-of-the-mill constipation caused by an opioid or something

like that. So why don't we kick it off with this patient case to set the stage?

Okay, so we have this 40-year-old female patient.

She's come into her primary care physician for an annual physical and requests drug therapy for her constipation.

She, you know, is talking about how she's been having this constipation since she was a teenager, but she's

never really gone to get help. She's tried random things over the years, and right now she's not

taking anything except Marilax, and she has no other really relevant past medical history.

She says that she doesn't really have any pain or tenderness. It goes to have a bowel movement

about one or two times a week, but even when

it happens, it's hard, it requires straining. She just doesn't feel good when she's going. And so

...