No consults to sell. No supplement line.
Is it SIBO, or something that looks like it?
IBS is a diagnosis of exclusion. SIBO is a test result. That difference is why people end up carrying both labels, and why two breath tests can disagree about the same person in the same week.
Start with what you were told you have- Lactulose
- Positive
- Glucose
- Negative
The ordinary outcome, not a lab error. Where patients took both tests, 74% of overgrowth diagnoses were made by the lactulose test alone.
Why they disagreeFour questions, in order
Start anywhere. Most people arrive in the middle, holding a result or a food list, and the order below is where that lands rather than a course you have to begin at the top.
What it is
What is this label, and is mine even the right one?
What each label actually claims, and which of them get mistaken for each other and why.
Cannot settle. Which one you have. Nothing on a website can settle that.
How you would know
What test would tell me, and what would it actually prove?
What each test physically measures, what it costs, and what a negative result leaves unexamined.
Cannot settle. Whether the test is right about you. The instrument itself is contested.
Which type
My test named a gas. What does that change?
What each gas indicates, why one of the three types is not bacterial at all, and what follows from the distinction.
Cannot settle. How severe yours is. The published cutoffs divide positive from negative and were never severity scales.
What people try
What do people do about it, and how much is behind any of it?
What each intervention is, what it costs, and how strong the evidence behind it actually is.
Cannot settle. What you should do. We publish no doses, protocols or product rankings, and that is deliberate.
Why you should believe any of this
Every source carries a label saying how strong it is, so a preprint never reads like a clinical guideline. Every price shows the date we checked it. Where specialists disagree we say so and name both positions instead of picking the tidier one.
The guideline underneath most of this rates five of its six recommendations as resting on evidence its own authors grade as very low quality. We would rather tell you that than write around it.