Apologies in advance to anyone of a nervous dispositon, but this is a review about piles and pile relief cream, and as such, I need to be descriptive, though hopefully not too graphic. Please stop now if you don't want to read any further:

I have suffered from nasty hemorrhoids now for the past seven years. I can almost trace it back to the day our son was born. Sitting with my other half through a long and painful labour, watching her strain and push our boy into the world, I pushed with her. I remember clearly I was suffering from IBS at that time, brought about by the stress of becoming a father for the first time, losing my beloved hamster and trying to learn how to drive all at one. It was too much for me. I still suffer from intermittent IBS and this is when my large and very painful swollen veiny piles are prone to rearing their large ugly heads.

My poor other half also suffers from piles and together we manage to console one another and have tried many and various treatments and so called remedies, some have been fairly successful but others not so good. I am in the process of considering surgery as currently they are so painful I am having a lot of difficulty in opening my bowels. I often I bleed into the toilet bowl and this can be a frightening experience the first time it happens as I convinced myself I was bowel cancer.. After many exploratory tests at my local hospital, I have been assured that it is an 'external' problem, and the condition which is commonly known as piles.

Lately my wife and I have been using a great cream called Anusol, which we each buy in a 43 g tube (though you can buy the smaller ones if you prefer) and this costs us £3.50 each. Until fairly recently I had been trying a suppository which had been recommended to me by a (good close) friend. Unfortunately this failed to work for me. During the night I suffered an embarrassing experience. I woke during the night to urinate (as I do) and I broke wind out of my anus as I strained to pee. I did not realise until the following morning after discovering what looked like a film of 'pebbledash' across our bathroom door and wall, that I had, in fact expelled the suppository out of my anus and it had peppered the wall with a fine white chalky deposit. Not nice - especially for my dear wife who had to clear it up as I was running late for work!

Both my wife and I have our own separate tubes of Anusol (for hygiene reasons) as this comes with a kind of little nozzle at the end which we endeavour to insert slightly into our respective rectums. I always like to spread extra cream on the outside of the bum hole so that it brings a kind of numbing an anesthetic relief to the piles, which hang down outside of my anus. It is difficult to guide the nozzle into my own anus, however, especially at night if I am tired. It is easier if I squat down on the bathroom floor, remove the bathroom mirror and place on the floor. Then, if I squat over the mirror and use a head torch I can just about see what I am doing and guide the nozzle in the right position. I have to say however, we have resorted, on many occasions, to helping one another out just to ensure the cream is actually going in correctly and performing one another's applications. This is much quicker and easier, and not as messy.

The cream is wonderful in that it reacts incredibly quickly in reducing the pain and swelling of the angry looking purple piles. The relief is, I can honestly say, immediate for me, though I do think it takes slightly longer for my other half as her piles are a little larger than mine and she has one or two more. This cream is soothing beyond belief and it aids me in actually just being able to do normal things again like riding my bike, sitting down and relaxing and even opening my bowels and straining without experiencing excruciating pain.
I really do rate this cream very highly. It is effective, easy to get hold of and is by far the best pain relief for piles I have ever used.

Thoroughly recommended by both me and my wife