I posted this information at least once before, I know: chances are, there's more going on with an enema than we understand. Once when reseraching migraine remedies to help a friend I came across use of an enema as an old Ayurvedic remedy for migraine - specifically, to give relief enough to get to sleep. That was before I knew as much about bottoms as now, and I didn't even bother to suggest it - not for embarrassment (I've always promoted enemas for at least some things) but because it sounded pretty bizarre. Their story was not that constipation per se had anything to do with the migraine, but that the vital essences (or something) had become stuck in the chakra of the intestine, and the enema got the vital essences flowing back to the brain chakra and other places it needed to go. Yes, well.
Then just a few years ago, I heard Dr Michael Gershon on PBS radio discussing the amazing and unsuspected discoveries in endocrinology over the past decade or so. For example, he claimed that the intestines held and controlled most of the neurotransmitters/mood chemicals in the body - many times more than the brain did, and that these actually were primarily useful to the body as essential components of the immune system. I almost put this down to the sometimes fringe speakers they tend to roll out during fund-raising drives, but then I caught that he was dean of various microbiological studies at Columbia U: no quack. So I read his book, The Second Brain - which claims the intestines to be almost that - at least in controlling things internally if not particularly in logical thinking.
I was stunned to realize that if you substituted neurotransmitters for vital essences, the old Ayurvedic story was absolutely prescient. That is, I believe - and I have heard medical professionals but not yet mainstream ones claim similarly - that enemas or other bottoms treatments can very likely stir up the neurotransmitters and get them on their way, boosting the immune system while rapidly causing psychic changes. (Yes, I know about the blood/brain barrier, but regardless....) There are enough folk remedies for everything from colds to moodiness that enemas have been widely reputed to cure or improve, and little or no credence given these on the basis of an assumption that the mechanism of action is simply relieving constipation, so if constipation likely didn't cause the problem, the story could be held to have no basis. The role of the intestines as monarch of neurotransmitters and viceroy of the immune system gives at least reasonable basis for revisiting the folk remedies without preconceptions about the mode of action.
It also has the felicitous effect of moving the subject of enemas - which in most peoples mind would be tantamount to the subject of poop - to a level of far more general interest and acceptance. You can't talk about poop at a church social, but you can talk about migraines and colds and immune systems and neurotransmitters, even if it starts or ends up down there. You can even mumble that enemas can even feel good if you do them right, and nobody will focus on that except ones who know or want to know about that.
One more story to repeat again. In college, a girl in my dorm was given to panic attacks or some similar fairly sudden and dramatic mood change, and could usually sense these coming on. She discovered by accident that a strong suppository - the Dulcolax/bisacodyl type - taken as soon as she began to feel the attack coming would usually cause her to bypass it. At the time we all assumed that it was just because it made her focus all her internal resources on a heavy session of pooping. Now it would seem very possible that the bowel stimulation in turn stimulated some release or rejiggering of the neurotransmitters.
At any rate, it is worth research - both personal and formal - and it opens an wide new avenue for conversation.
-jillie