Irritable Bowel Syndrome: Myths, Common Mistakes, and What Doctors Often Miss

When the stomach and intestines start acting up — bloating, diarrhoea, constipation, nausea — the instinctive response is either to see a gastroenterologist or to dismiss it as "just nerves" and wait it out. Both paths, taken alone, lead to mistakes.

Myth One: "It's Either in Your Head or in Your Gut"

Irritable bowel syndrome is simultaneously a disease of both the head and the gut. Treating only one and ignoring the other gets patients nowhere. Someone who spends years seeing only a gastroenterologist without psychiatric support, and someone who is told "it's psychosomatic, just relax" — both remain stuck for the same reason: they are seeing only half the picture.

Myth Two: "If the Gut Reacts, the Food Must Be the Problem"

A widespread mistake is to look for the cause exclusively in diet. Dr. Saulitis explains the mechanism differently: when a person is under prolonged stress, the sympathetic nervous system becomes overloaded, and the bowel starts behaving like a hyperreactive organ — much the way asthmatic lungs react to triggers that would cause no reaction at all under normal conditions. In other words, even high-quality food eaten in a state of chronic stress is not absorbed as it should be: the biochemical synthesis chain shifts, and the body simply does not get what it needs from what has been eaten.

Myth Three: "Stress Is an Explanation, Not a Diagnosis"

Another common mistake is treating "it's from stress" as a doctor's excuse for finding nothing. In reality, there is specific neurophysiology behind it: adrenal exhaustion from prolonged stress, a drop in natural cortisol, disrupted synthesis of serotonin and melatonin — these are concrete mechanisms, not metaphors. Childhood psychological trauma and incorrectly formed reflexes also play a role: they literally condition how the nervous system responds to pressure in adult life.

What This Means in Practice

Treating gut disorders of psychosomatic origin requires both a psychiatrist and a gastroenterologist working together as a team — not one after the other. Attempting to address the problem from only one side — whether through medication for the bowel alone or conversations about stress without medical oversight — does not produce lasting results. The key is to understand the process itself: what is happening in the system, why the gut becomes a particular person's "weak link," and only then build a comprehensive course of treatment.