How common is SIBO in my practice? Any data?

We don’t have any formal data, but I can tell you that it’s very common, and as we’ll be discussing as we go through the SIBO and just Functional Medicine and testing in general, I know many of you have heard the phrase “clinical diagnosis,” which means that the results of the tests are only one of the factors that you consider when making a diagnosis. We know from the research literature that about 20 to 30 percent, depending on what study you look at, of healthy patients with no, who don’t claim to have any, symptoms have SIBO at least in terms of the lactulose breath test. It’s a test that has high sensitivity but relatively low specificity, which means there is a potential for [a] false positive, and even when the results are positive, meaning they could be correlated against a small bowel aspirate, which is the gold standard for SIBO testing. Don’t worry if you’re confused; we’re going to go over all of this. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the SIBO is causing problems for that patient. This is where some of the nuance that I was talking about before, Liz, comes in. When it comes to SIBO, as you’ll see, it’s never cut and dried. Anyone who is out there saying that it is has probably not been treating patients in the clinic with SIBO for very long.