“Ditch the suppositories and dig stim and pop an enema every four or five days!! Been doin’ it for 4 years and it’s changed my life.”

It takes a lot to make me do a double take these days, but when I came across this enthusiastic suggestion on an SCI forum, I couldn’t help it. The post was a response to a quad’s desperate plea for help improving his lengthy bowel program, and the poster was one of many who’d chimed in with a wide range of solutions.

As puzzling as I found the advice — which ran contrary to pretty much everything anyone has ever told me — I was equally perplexed by the number of positive upvotes the post received. Not only had people “liked” the post, but many had shared their own similar variations and taken time to defend the approach in subsequent posts. My initial response was to dismiss the questionable-at-best advice as internet trolling, but I don’t think it was, and there is a more valuable lesson in approaching it as genuine advice.

When it comes to SCI — and pretty much every other topic — in today’s world, we are bombarded by more information, more advice and more “solutions” than at any point in history. When NEW MOBILITY launched in 1989, there were only a handful of places you could even hope to find advice from longtime-wheelchair users. Today you can use your phone to pull up thousands of sincere, though unverified, insights in seconds.

In addition to the multitude of useful ideas shared by members of our community, you’re likely to stumble on a few facetious or deliberately misleading posts. Thankfully the ratio tilts heavily toward the former. It’s a third category of posts that pose a problem, a category I would argue the enthusiastic enema lover’s post falls into: genuine, well-intentioned advice of dubious merit.

Giving our friend the benefit of the doubt, it’s great if that routine works for him, but I’ve been around SCI long enough to know there’s a good chance it will lead to complications, if not serious health problems, for many people.

I’d love to ask the poster how he settled into that routine, but in all honesty, the specifics don’t really matter. At some point he tried it, it worked for his lifestyle and he stuck with it. We can debate whether he should continue with it or move on — but abandoning an approach that is working for you is never easy. In fact, it can be downright terrifying. The prospect of immediate certainty and convenience often trumps long-term benefits, especially when dealing with something as complicated as living with a spinal cord injury.

My life on wheels has convinced me that different approaches work for different people, and what may seem insane to one person can be the key to an active life for another. Knowing this, I’m immediately leery of anyone who tells me they have “the” answer that will fix all my problems. I’ve learned to be optimistic yet skeptical and to scour other people’s ideas for tactics that make sense for me. Taking advice from a stranger on the internet may seem sketchy, but we’ve all encountered our share of sketchy medical professionals too. You have to learn to trust your internal BS detector. In the case of the enema lover, my detector said: good intent, questionable advice.

NEW MOBILITY is here to help you tackle that process for yourself. You can find more tips from wheelchair users in Bob Vogel’s feature on the “Best Advice for People with SCI from People with SCI”. But in the end, your success will come down to you and your ability to know and trust your body.