4.What are the most common symptoms? 2 - Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Testing for IBS
As previously suggested, irritable bowel syndrome is not a recognizable disease or illness nor is there a recognized test which can categorically establish whether someone is suffering from IBS or not.

Nevertheless, although 95% of the IBS diagnostic process will be based on the kind of questions highlighted in the previous section, there are a few tests that your doctor might carry out to rule out other conditions. In this way, whilst they cannot positively say with 100% certainty that you are suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, they can narrow it down to being a distinct possibility that you are.

The amount of testing that your doctor or hospital does depends on several factors, including your gender, age, your previous medical record, how severe your symptoms are, how often they appear, and so on.

For instance, I suggested that the most common IBS sufferer is likely to be a young woman in her 20s. Consequently, if the patient matches this age and gender profile, most doctors will do little more than a simple blood test to rule out the most likely alternatives before diagnosing irritable bowel syndrome.

If on the other hand the patient is a 60-year-old male, more detailed testing is likely to be needed as this individual is far less likely to have developed irritable bowel syndrome for the first time. The patient is the wrong gender and the wrong age, which tends to suggest that the condition is something other than IBS, hence more thorough testing would be called for.

Some of the tests that might be carried out to establish whether your problem is irritable bowel syndrome or not are full medical examinations and analyses of your complete medical history, detailed stool analysis and a complete or full blood count test.

And of course, depending upon the ailment or disease which your doctor suspects you may be suffering from, the range and number of tests that they conduct will vary from case to case.

Basically, with most or all of these tests, your doctor or medical specialist is trying to establish that irritable bowel syndrome is not your problem, usually based on the suspicion that something possibly far more serious is the cause of your current difficulties.

Remember, IBS is not a single recognizable disease and there is no specific test for it, so by definition, all of these tests must be for something else.

Questions to ask…
As is probably obvious by now, if your doctor runs a multitude of tests, it is because they suspect that your condition is not irritable bowel syndrome. Hence, there are questions that you should be prepared to ask your doctor when seeking their advice about what you suspect to be IBS.

For example, whether your doctor decides to carry out a multitude of tests or not, you need to establish whether your condition could be anything other than irritable bowel syndrome. Specifically, you need to ask about other, more serious conditions, especially colon cancer.

On the other hand, if your doctor does not ask you to undergo a program of testing and suggests that you are indeed suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, there are questions that you need to ask in this situation as well.

For instance, many patients who suffer from IBS will from time to time become constipated. In this situation, many people would be tempted to use an over-the-counter laxative to ‘free up’ their problem but you should not do so without asking your doctor whether this is okay.

As IBS is a condition that seems to be caused by over-sensitivity in your digestive system and colon, using laxatives may in fact make the condition worse, so don’t consider using them before asking.

As you will read, one very effective way of dealing with irritable bowel syndrome is to change your diet (and your lifestyle) to one that is more amenable to your condition. It will do no harm to ask your doctor’s advice about dietary matters because they will certainly have some ideas that might be useful to you.