Katie Morra

Most over-testing comes from ordering by panel instead of by question. Decide what you need to know first, and the instrument picks itself — along with the three you did not need to run. Order by question, not by panel The usual sequence is backwards. A practitioner has a complicated patient, feels the pull to be thorough, and orders a stool test, a breath test, a hormone panel and a nutrient panel at once. Two thousand dollars later there is a folder of results and no more clarity than...

A bout of food poisoning years ago can leave behind an autoimmune injury to the gut's pacemaker cells. That injury impairs motility permanently, and impaired motility is why the SIBO keeps coming back no matter how well you clear it. The question it answers Most IBS diagnoses are arrived at by exclusion. Everything else was ruled out, nothing was found, and the patient leaves with a label that describes their symptoms back to them and explains nothing. They have usually also been told,...

A large share of the world carries H. pylori and most of them will never have a problem from it. So a positive result is the beginning of the question, not the answer — and the virulence factors underneath it are where the answer actually lives. Presence is not the question H. pylori is one of the most widely carried organisms in human beings. Estimates vary by region and by population, but across the world it is carried by a very large number of people, most of whom never develop an ulcer, a...