Piles affect at least 40% of the adult population in any Western country. So people who have piles where they have an itchy bottom, they have a bit of bleeding on the toilet paper when they wipe themselves after opening their bowels or perhaps they can just feel a bit of a lump when they touch their bottom. People are very embarrassed about it, they feel it's something they can't talk about but what they don't realize is they walk down the street is that about ½ the adults that they're passing have got exactly the same problem. So it's really nothing to be embarrassed about. Also for doctors, for GPs, its very much bread and butter stuff, we see it all the time and most of us don't mind looking at people's bottoms, in fact I much prefer looking at bottoms to feet for instance! It's just a personal phobia. So, I don't think we need to worry about going to the GP, You're certainly not alone, the GP has seen it before. The only thing is, it's best not to totally ignore it.

In the vast majority of cases, if you get an itchy bottom and a bit of bleeding on the toilet paper and you can feel a bit of a lump, you've got piles. And you can just make sure that you don't get constipated because that's the thing that pushed the piles out. Piles are just varicose veins that you get in the legs, that's what piles are in the in the back passage. It's where the veins, which take blood back to the heart, get engorged, they get a bit swollen, and because of that they get itchy and because of that, you tend to scratch them in your sleep, they tend to bleed a bit.

So they never turn into cancer, they're not cancer, the only thing is that they're best not ignored.