Who Are
The Encopresis Information Exchange?

They live in Liverpool, North West England and have two sons who were diagnosed as encopretic; 1993 for the first son and then approximately 18 months later for the youngest.

By that time they had experienced many other difficulties with the childrens' health and this compounded them even more.

The family felt misrepresented, isolated. Ostracised by their own communion of family, neighbours and friends. It seemed no one understood, wanted to understand, or indeed offer help or support.

Adding pressure on to pressure, Cathy tried to find out more about the illness and what, if anything, could be done about it. This fruitless research was abandoned after an intensive drive through every library in the district resulting in only 4 lines of text in a medical handbook, which only stated what they already knew.

Tony became more and more frustrated over the inability to assist, due to work commitments and an increasing disrespect for any health professionals who "tried to help"

This visble mix of anger and depression led to the family as a whole being referred to a psychiatric clinic as it was assumed that "theraputic counselling" would identify the problem and within a time scale, alleviate it.

Within this time, Tony purchased computer equipment for the home and took advantage of a trial offer from a well known ISP to "surf the 'net". Being totally new to this form of information gathering it was natural that the first word keyed into the search engine was ENCOPRESIS

The couple were astounded by the amount of information that arrived via their P.C..

With careful filtering, and now asking the right people the right questions, their knowlege grew to an understanding that their sons condition is not :-

• Purely a psychological hiccup
• Far from rare

And perhaps more importantly, It might be cured!