Marie,
I don't treat my cuffitis with any of the standard methods. I can't take Canasa because I am allergic to mesalamine. When I was sick with UC and on Asacol (which did nothing to help me by the way), I developed a serious hypersensitivity reaction and now most doctors are averse to having me take the drug in any form. I'm also very sensitive to steroid preparations, as they give me terrible acne. It's just not worth it to trade cuffitis for acne that is so bad that I hate going out of the house, especially since the symptoms just reappear once the steroid is finished. I know that there are generally fewer systemic side effects with topical steroids when compared to oral ones, but the topical ones still give me problems.
I've really tried to find other ways of helping my inflammation. For instance, I've suffered from eczema for many years, and I've noticed that specific foods, especially dairy, exacerbate it. As a result, I started to wonder if some protein or proteins in dairy interfere with the tight junctions in my skin epithelial cells, thereby making them more permeable and open to inflammation. Since the intestines are also lined with epithelial cells, I tried applying the same logic there. It seems to help, but there can be any number of variables affecting the inflammatory process, so Jan is right in saying that things can flare back up for seemingly no reason at all.
I really do think that there are things in our food, water, air, etc. that are behind the massive rise in immune system diseases. It seems like more and more people are getting some sort of chronic disease, much to the satisfaction of pharmaceutical companies.
A salient question is whether our bodies are continually reacting to entities that it perceives as foreign (because they are truly bad), or have there been permanent changes in our DNA which lead to improper inflammatory responses?