IC Disease

One hot drink that is hard for many IC patients to give up is their morning routine of drinking coffee. For some patients, drinking coffee (and carbonated soda) is an all-day thing. For those people it is even harder. Most hot teas even need to be cut out at first. Until your bladder heals, here are some suggestions from the IC Network on what you can drink if you’re craving something hot.

• First start off with hot water or hot milk with honey and sugar.
• Go to the local Starbucks and ask for hot milk with vanilla flavoring.
• The first teas to try once the bladder starts healing are chamomile and peppermint - both are bowel and bladder friendly.
• If these teas are tolerated well, try roasted carob tea. Celestial Seasonings makes several which are fairly IC friendly, including Gingerbread Spice, Almond Sunset, English Toffee and Vanilla Hazelnut.

• If your bladder is tolerating the roasted carob teas, you could then try the herbal coffees (Pero or Cafix). These are an acquired taste but quite a few patients like them. If your bladder doesn’t react to the herbal coffees, then try the LOW ACID regular coffees made by Euromild or Puroast.

If you are having an IC flare, the IC Network recommends going back to basics and just drinking water (not tap!) and milk.

This is not from the IC Network but from personal experience: When my bladder is acting up I drink marshmallow root tea. I read about it in a book I had purchased on IC - To Wake In Tears by Catherine Simone. I also have a sister-in-law who has Interstitial Cystitis and she drinks a lot of marshmallow root tea. It definitely provides some relief. I have to add sugar to mine in order to get it down but my SIL drinks it plain. You can purchase marshmallow root tea at your local health food store.

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