Pancrelipase

Other patients will develop pancreatic insufficiency, and they'll need replacement enzymes.

They're called Creon is the drug name.

And so if you go to lunch or dinner with patients, which I often do, when the meal comes out, the pills come out and they take the digestive enzymes with their meal.

So you can take them in pill form just as the pancreas can make it.

Okay, so this is pancreatin.

Now, pancreatin, you may have heard of.

Pancreatin is the name of basically an extract.

In this case, the number two here is a beef extract.

The number one is a pork extract.

They were called Ultrase MT18s, and those enzymes were literally the only enzyme that I could take that didn't constipate me or make me have, you know, the oily stool.

And once they took those off the market, we started experimenting with the Creon and the, um...

Dang, I don't even remember what they're all called now.

It's been so long since I've taken them.

[laughs] But we tried the Creon.

We tried the Lipase.

You know, all of them.

So it's all very interesting.

I mean it obviously everything all depends on the individual and what they can do and what they're able to do and if somebody is you know more more palliative or or you know at the end of the and then you might change some of the advice that you give.

If somebody's on lots of medication, say for example, they're on 20 Creon tablets a day, they still may choose to take them because they know it controls their diarrhea, but they may choose not to because they're fed up of having all those tablets all the time.

They may switch to loperamide just to calm things down.

It's really something that we adapt.