Digestion

The complaints we hear most

Bloating that builds through the day. Bowels that swing between too fast and too slow. Reflux that turns up at night. Feeling full after half a meal. A gut that has become unpredictable enough that people plan their week around it.

These are common, they are genuinely disruptive, and most of them have no single cause. That is why the useful first step is a careful history rather than a theory.

Read this part before anything else

Some symptoms need investigating, and no complementary approach should be in front of that. Go to your GP, promptly, if you have:

• blood in your stool, or black stools
• weight loss you did not intend
• difficulty swallowing, or food sticking
• vomiting that keeps coming back
• a change in your bowel habit that has lasted more than a few weeks, particularly over 50
• anaemia found on a blood test
• a family history of bowel cancer or coeliac disease, with new symptoms
• pain that wakes you at night

None of those mean something sinister is happening. They mean the question gets answered properly first. If you tell us about any of them, that is what we will say, at the first appointment.

What is reasonable to work on

Once serious causes have been ruled out, the reachable parts are the ordinary ones: meal timing and spacing, how fast you eat, what the evening meal looks like, fibre and fluid, sleep, and the stress loop — because the gut and the nervous system are wired together and most people with long-term gut symptoms can feel it.

Progress here is unglamorous and gradual. We will not promise you a resolution, and we will tell you if we think you have hit the limit of what this can do.

What we will not do

We do not recommend any medicine, herb or supplement on a web page, and we do not sell anything from one. We also do not use the elimination diets that circulate online as a default: taking food groups out without a reason creates its own problems, particularly in older people.

Bringing it in

Come with a rough record of a fortnight — what you ate, when, and what happened. It is unglamorous and it is the single most useful thing you can arrive with.