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Diarrhoea means passing loose motions often and usually with urgency—in other words, you can’t wait long once you get the urge to open your bowels.
Possible causes include infections, radiation treatment to the bowel, and some drugs—antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs, or overuse of laxatives. Diarrhoea can also be due to what we call malabsorption—here the bowel can’t absorb certain substances into the blood from inside it. The diarrhoea of malabsorption often consists of large, pale, soft motions which contain a lot of fat. This makes them float and therefore hard to flush away. Causes of malabsorption include diseases (including cancer) of the liver, pancreas or small bowel, blockage of the tubes running from the liver or pancreas into the bowel and surgical removal of parts of the small bowel. Nervous tension can also cause diarrhoea, or aggravate it, whatever its original cause.
If your diarrhoea is due to infection, this should be treated. If it is due to radiation, your course of treatment could be adjusted— talk to your doctor about this. If your diarrhoea is due to chemotherapy drugs, you could consider reducing the dose or even cutting out the responsible drug altogether.
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