The rash has continued to fade and not much else has changed. I also saw my GI on Tuesday. He wants me to continue to taper off prednisone and try to establish a "maintenance" dose of entocort. I should note that I am not tapering off prednisone in hopes that the helminthic treatment is working. It will be many more months before the whipworms are fully colonized and John Scott sent me this really great post by Jasper Lawrence on why Chron's sufferers should really wait close to a year before attempting a med taper in favor of helminths.
Rather, I am tapering off of prednisone in favor of entocort (a formulation of budesonide) at my doctor's recommendation because it has fewer systemic side effects. Prednisone is quite simply nasty stuff to be on long term. My first blog post coincidentally was during the first week where I had started taking budesonide and had begun a slow tapering down from prednisone at 40mg. I began the prednisone after my extremely bad 6MP reaction.
"Normally" I haven't taken either prednisone or budesonide as maintenance medications. I have been taking Asacol for roughly 12 years and for most of that time it seemed like it has supported remission but the last couple of years have been rocky and I have had to use prednisone several months at a time to quiet some bad flares. It's my doctor's opinion that I may need to be on something like budesonide long term. Of course it's my hope that it won't come to that.
As an aside, even if the helminthic therapy produces good results I don't plan on eliminating Asacol from my regime. I seem to tolerate it fine; it has few side effects; and there's even some evidence that it may be protective in colo-rectal cancer [Tang 2010].
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