Do you always retest after the SIBO protocol?

I think retesting is critical, and one of the biggest mistakes I see in Functional Medicine practice, if you’re starting out or even practicing for a long time is not retesting. I’ll give you an example of why. If you test for SIBO and you get a positive result, you treat SIBO, [and] the patient is feeling better after the protocol, we don’t actually know if you treated the SIBO successfully. Sometimes, what happens in that situation is you’ll retest, and the SIBO will still be positive. The patient is feeling better, so what happened? Well, maybe what you treated in the protocol wasn’t SIBO, and what was actually making them feel bad, therefore, was not necessarily SIBO or not exclusively SIBO. So then, at that point, you have the decision about whether you should go forward and treat the SIBO because it’s still positive on the test even though they’re feeling better. There are some reasons to do that or not. Likewise, if the patient doesn’t feel better after the SIBO protocol, you could make the assumption that the treatment wasn’t successful for SIBO, but if you retest, you might find actually the SIBO is gone and the patient is still feeling bad. What’s happening? Well, there may be some other issue that’s causing that person’s symptoms, even though the patient and perhaps you assume that SIBO was [the] cause or wasn’t. I think retesting is critical for those reasons.