Up to 15% of U.S. adults are estimated to have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). The Examine team has put together a new page on this condition, which we’ll expand upon with more evidence over time. Check it out:
IBS — A summary of the evidence
Why did we make an IBS page?
While IBS can have a major negative effect on quality of life, you’d never know it by its portrayal in the media. I still vividly remember a dumb Ben Stiller romantic comedy from a couple decades ago, in which IBS is the central joke of his character for the first part of the movie.
Although this kind of humor is natural to some extent (toilet humor that is, not Ben Stiller humor), embarrassment over health conditions can seriously get in the way of treatment.
Aside from destigmatizing this condition, we had two other main reasons for creating an IBS page:
- To counteract the plethora of overly-simplistic, ad-filled pages that pop up when you search for IBS. (Go ahead, try Googling IBS.)
- To serve as a springboard into our extended coverage of gut-related health conditions, which we’re designing as a hub for people to find the latest evidence from an unbiased source. We have no gurus or cherry-picked evidence.
What can you expect from our gut health pages now and as time goes on?
Gut health is a complex and widely-misunderstood topic, so we wanted a specialist to create our IBS page.
Enter Dr. Gabrielle Fundaro, who’s conducted academic gut health research and taught at a university level. She’s working on a variety of gut health pages for Examine, and we’ve also enlisted the help of additional researchers and reviewers to accelerate the process.
You can expect Examine to cover substantially more treatments as time goes on, as well as additional gut-related health condition pages.
It takes some serious effort to analyze individual studies, so this won’t be an overnight process. But you can be certain that our analyses will stay up to date, and won’t be biased for or against any particular strategy.
If you’re particularly interested in us covering a specific gut health treatment, let us know by replying to this email. And if you want to out yourself as a fellow watcher of Ben Stiller rom-coms, you can also let me know that. Please include your favorites and least favorites.
Sincerely,
Kamal Patel
Co-founder, Examine