All in the mind/all in the gut: it’s a false dichotomy.
Many of the posts in this blog tend to focus on trauma, stress and how what happens to us affects how the gut feels and misbehaves, but please don’t conclude … Continue reading
IBS: fact or fiction?
By the nineteen nineties, I had been conducting clinical research for 20 years. I knew my trade, had published several hundred papers in academic journals and was in demand on … Continue reading
IBS: Working with Complexity
I was taught medicine from the bottom up, First understand the components, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology and then put these together to understand the whole patient, but human life doesn’t … Continue reading
Lumping and Splitting. IBS and IBD; when does irritable become inflammatory?
As a medical student, I learnt that Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, now lumped together as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) were serious, life threatening, long term conditions affecting the bowel. … Continue reading
Does you doctor always know best or can you sort something out between you?
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines, of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) … Continue reading
So why do we feel ill?
The post I wrote last week, ‘Stuck, when your bowels rule your life’, raised a bit of a storm. Several people wrote into Facebook to assert how much worse Crohn’s … Continue reading
Stool Gazing: A Definitive Guide.
In the nineteen sixties before the age of scans and blood tests for everything, medical students were drilled on in the arts of history taking and clinical examination. Xrays and … Continue reading
It may be shocking, but does your doctor understand your IBS?
Sam Bearfoot, who blogs and broadcasts on UK Health Radio as The Digestion Detective, wrote last week to say how much she enjoyed The IBS Network’s 25th Anniversary Event, ‘IBS, … Continue reading
IBS: let’s change the model.
The practice of medicine still operates on a model that was developed early in the last century. First establish the diagnosis, then identify the cause and finally apply the treatment. … Continue reading
The Sensitive Gut 