When you are having symptoms from your digestive system, there can be many explanations. It is vitally important to look for the real cause(s) and not jump to conclusions or settle for just doing things that help the symptoms without doing everything possible to understand what is really going on with your health.
Many people feel that your doctor’s main job is to treat your medical problems.
In fact, your doctor’s first job (after emergency care, if needed) is to diagnose the cause of your health symptoms or signs. You want to avoid the situation of having some unknown medical problem get worse while you are getting relief of symptoms by some means that does take care of the cause of the symptoms.
Be sure to talk to your doctor about any symptoms or medical problems or concerns you have. Do not just try things to see what is helpful.
There are very many things that can cause digestive symptoms. On this page I will include information on only a very few of these possible medical problems, as there are some that are not commonly known or that cause a lot of confusion.
If you think any of these medical problems might apply to you, please discuss this with your doctor.
A few topics to consider if you are having ongoing digestive system symptoms:
About FODMAPs:
King’s College London article
Sports Dietitians Australia article
IBS Group guidelines
Today’s Dietitian article
About SIBO – Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth
Article on Medscape, dated Sep/14 link
About Bile Acid Malabsorption
professional article link
patient information page link
newspaper story link
About the “Specific Carbohydrate Diet”
There is a highly-detailed and complex dietary program that goes by the name “Specific Carbohydrate Diet”. It was developed by a mother decades ago in a desperate attempt to help her daughter’s severe digestive system illness.
Interest in this program has persisted over time – though the science behind the theory is not clear and it has been far too little studied to arrive at any conclusions as to it’s effectiveness or it’s potential role in clinical practice.
Just this past year (2015) a small study was done at the Mayo Clinic.
The study and it’s results are presented in this video:
Core Health MD 