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LAURA RAFFALS: What really excites me about where the field is moving is how we're starting to understand ways to personalize our treatment approaches. When a patient is presenting with symptoms that we think could be related to underlying inflammatory bowel disease, we look to the right test to make the diagnosis. Endoscopy is critical to making a diagnosis. So we often want tissue or biopsy samples. If you have somebody with isolated disease in the small intestine, getting to that area of involvement can be tricky. And that's where our use of single-balloon endoscopy or double-balloon enteroscopy can be really helpful.
It's really been exciting to see ultrasound gain a place in how we manage our patients with IBD. We've been looking to ultrasound to help us assess disease activity. And this is great because it's really a safe modality for our patients. And in fact, recently I had a pregnant patient with active symptoms, and it was so nice to be able to have my radiologists do a simple ultrasound to assess her disease. It gave me great information without exposing her to any radiation.
One area of our field of inflammatory bowel disease that's been really exciting to watch has been the microbiome and its role in IBD, not just the structure of the microbial community, but also the function of that microbial community. Our hope is that at some point we'll have a good understanding of how we can influence the microbial community, change the structure of the microbial community.
We have a better understanding of how to position our therapies. And even some research we're doing now allows us to take the patient's genetic background to help us personalize their treatment approach even more. So many of our patients come in on multiple drugs, and understanding how to optimize a patient's medical regimen, also recognizing where we can simplify things and prevent drug interactions, can be a real challenge.
And that's why we have an IBD specialty pharmacist who's able to evaluate all of our patients' medical regimens. We find the one drug that works for them. And then, ideally, they can stay on that drug long term. And then, we see less complications from disease. And at the end of the day, we are in this for our patients. We have a lot of great things to offer here at Mayo Clinic with our integrative practice. But then, what's key is the ability to communicate that with our referring physicians. We see this as a collaborative effort to meet the needs of our patients.
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