Welcome

FASTR is what you get when a Silicon Valley product designer uses a modern design approach to successfully resolve a persistent and pernicious anal fissure. I created FASTR (Fissure-in-Ano Self-Treatment and Repair) to consolidate key data, personal experience, a little discretion, and plenty of empathy in a way that can save you time and reduce suffering.

As I discovered, a chronic fissure (sometimes called an anal ulcer, anal lesion, or anal tear) can disrupt pretty much everything in life, robbing you of joy, peace, and productivity. If this condition is affecting you or a loved one, you’re likely seeking a fast and lasting solution. Those were my goals, so I developed a protocol that worked for me. I hope that sharing it as a pattern can help you build your own effective protocol.

If the term “protocol” sounds a tad formal, call it your method, style, way…whatever. The main idea is to put some repeatable steps together that will keep moving you in a positive direction. Being thoughtful about how you act toward yourself can help you create, evaluate, and refine your own path to success.

That’s where some Silicon Valley style steps in. Modern product design involves the entire experience, not just parts or functions. It targets goals rather than “pain points”, encourages experimenting, and stresses solving over struggling. In the tech industry, companies use “experience design” to improve their bottom line, so can the same approach help fix a fissure? I say yes. Here’s why:

Our alimentary canal, also known as our gastrointestinal (GI) tract, is a nearly 30-foot-long (6 meter) sequence of mostly hollow organs that finds itself quite popular. We use it constantly, depend on it for survival, and dedicate large parts of our days, homes, planet, and economy to keep it filled, flushed, calmed, and cleansed. Its entrance, the mouth, is among our most pronounced features, while its exit sits at our body’s crossroads and can be involved in almost every motion we make. Since a fissure is damage in the last inch or so, what we consume and how we sit, stand, lie, or move can cause intense, lingering pain.

As a designer, I appreciate that our digestive exit is well-placed. But repairing problems here is like using slow-dry concrete to fix the floor in a busy and crowded transit hub. In that sense, a fissure isn’t just an injury—it’s an ongoing impediment to a prominent, pressurized, and virtually perpetual process.

I’ll say more about our design later, but for now, here’s the point: many of your daily activities directly influence the repair work you need to do. So, as I learned, to build an effective protocol you must look at most, if not all, aspects of your regular routine. That’s why nearly everything is involved.

By considering your own total experience, you can build a custom protocol that orients and organizes your efforts—whatever form they end up taking—around clear goals.

To provide a sample pattern, I split aspects of my protocol across several sections, and I recommend reading them in this order:

Before we move on, I need to mention three things:

First, while I hope this information may help you, it’s not a substitute for medical advice or assistance. For me, resolution included care from qualified medical professionals. There’s a lot going on in this humble anatomy, so if you haven’t met with your doctor, it makes sense to get an appointment soon.

Second, I’m not selling exclusive or mysterious remedies, and no products or services are needed to build a protocol. If a product helped me, I may provide affiliate links to well-known shopping sites as a convenience, but I also provide enough detail so you can find each product on your own. As an authored work, FASTR is available for purchase in several formats, some of which may contain additional content. But above all, I created FASTR to share some learnings that I found useful.

Third, my use of the term “experiments” doesn’t mean trying anything strange or dangerous; it just means making small changes to current activities and evaluating the results. However, though experimenting helped me, I also tried a few things spontaneously that ended up being…sub-optimal. So please give any experiment some research and forethought. For example, a temporary liquid diet might do more harm than good, and adding epsom salt to bathwater could end up drying and tightening skin that should stay hydrated and flexible. So if you choose to build and test a protocol, please don’t be rash—plan first, then act.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.

Last updated: June 2019