How to do a colonoscopy

When a person's colonoscopy shows disease, he or she needs to go to the hospital for treatment. Most intestinal treatments in hospitals involve colonoscopy. Before doing a colonoscopy, you need to clean your intestines first. The doctor will give you some laxatives and ask you to go to the toilet frequently so that the intestines can be cleaned. Let's take a closer look at how a colonoscopy should be performed.

1. Bowel preparation: Bowel preparation means emptying the feces in the large intestine for inspection. This is the key to the success of colonoscopy. You need to strictly prepare at home in advance according to the hospital's requirements.

First of all, you should eat liquid food (residue-free diet, no dairy products and foods with seeds such as watermelon) the day before the examination, and fast for breakfast on the day of the examination. Those so-called experiences that say people are afraid of not having enough energy during the examination and suggest eating more before the examination are not advisable.

Patients over 60 years old must undergo an electrocardiogram before surgery to prevent accidents.

2. Examination position: Lie on your side with your knees and hips bent, that is, curl up and lie on your side on the examination bed with your back to the doctor. Some units require changing into special open-crotch pants before the examination, while some hospitals do not require it and just require taking off the pants.

3. Examination time: generally 15 minutes, which may vary depending on individual differences or colon lesions.

4. Anesthesia: Ordinary examinations do not require anesthesia, and the examination process is not too painful, but it varies from person to person; painless examinations require intravenous anesthetic injections before the examination, which are generally short-acting. You can wake up quickly after the examination, but you must observe for a certain period of time before leaving, and you cannot drive a car, ride an electric bike, work at high altitudes, or perform delicate work on the same day after the examination;

5. Examination process: After you are in the correct position, the doctor will ask you to relax and start the examination. Insert the lubricated fiberscope into the intestine from the anus and continue to push it in. This process feels like defecating. Sometimes a small amount of air needs to be injected into the intestinal cavity to expand or expose the intestinal cavity. At this time, the patient often feels obvious abdominal distension. Due to the tortuosity of the large intestine, or the patient's history of abdominal surgery, intestinal adhesions, the patient will feel some distension and pain when the colonoscope passes through. At these times, you can take a deep breath and try to relax your whole body, which can make the examination more smoothly completed.