Which of these do people actually confuse?
Nine conditions overlap in this space, which makes 36 possible pairs. Most sites pick the pairs that suit their product. We measured all 36 against 7,205,554 patient comments and wrote about the ones people genuinely discuss together.
How we decided which pages to write
We counted comments mentioning both conditions across 18 patient subreddits, then wrote pages only for pairs above 2,000 co-mentions. The threshold was set after seeing all 36 counts, not before. Every count and every query is published below, including for the pairs we skipped.
Pairs we wrote about
| Pair | Comments discussing both | Share of the smaller topic | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| IBS or SIBO? | 16,408 | 8.8% | Written |
| SIBO or Candida? | 15,014 | 14.3% | Written |
| MCAS or Long COVID gut? | 9,693 | 4.9% | Written |
| MCAS or POTS / dysautonomia? | 8,976 | 11.4% | Written |
| MCAS or Histamine intolerance? | 8,253 | 24.3% | Written |
| Long COVID gut or POTS / dysautonomia? | 7,177 | 9.1% | Written |
| SIBO or MCAS? | 6,296 | 3.1% | Written |
| SIBO or Histamine intolerance? | 5,086 | 15.0% | Written |
| MCAS or Toxic mold / CIRS? | 3,167 | 11.8% | Written |
| MCAS or Food allergy / intolerance? | 2,863 | 6.9% | Written |
| SIBO or Food allergy / intolerance? | 2,409 | 5.8% | Written |
| IBS or MCAS? | 2,387 | 1.3% | Written |
| IBS or Food allergy / intolerance? | 2,063 | 5.0% | Written |
Pairs we did not write about, and their numbers
These 23 pairs fell below the threshold. That does not mean the conditions are unrelated. It means we could not find enough patients discussing them together to justify a page, and we would rather say so than publish a page built on an assumption.
| Pair | Comments discussing both |
|---|---|
| SIBO and Long COVID gut | 1,856 |
| SIBO and Toxic mold / CIRS | 1,676 |
| IBS and Candida | 1,603 |
| Histamine intolerance and Long COVID gut | 1,597 |
| MCAS and Candida | 1,415 |
| Candida and Toxic mold / CIRS | 1,233 |
| IBS and Histamine intolerance | 1,176 |
| Histamine intolerance and Candida | 1,052 |
| Histamine intolerance and Food allergy / intolerance | 1,026 |
| SIBO and POTS / dysautonomia | 1,000 |
| IBS and Long COVID gut | 952 |
| Long COVID gut and Candida | 890 |
| IBS and POTS / dysautonomia | 787 |
| Long COVID gut and Toxic mold / CIRS | 779 |
| Histamine intolerance and POTS / dysautonomia | 721 |
| Candida and Food allergy / intolerance | 719 |
| Long COVID gut and Food allergy / intolerance | 634 |
| Histamine intolerance and Toxic mold / CIRS | 631 |
| POTS / dysautonomia and Food allergy / intolerance | 302 |
| Food allergy / intolerance and Toxic mold / CIRS | 240 |
| POTS / dysautonomia and Toxic mold / CIRS | 237 |
| IBS and Toxic mold / CIRS | 194 |
| POTS / dysautonomia and Candida | 151 |
Common questions
- How did you decide which condition pairs to write about?
- By counting how often patients discuss both conditions in the same comment, across 7,205,554 comments from 18 communities. Pairs above the threshold got a page. Every count, including for the pairs we skipped, is published below with its query.
- Why publish the pairs you did not write about?
- Because a threshold you can only see the winners of is not a threshold, it is a preference. Showing the whole distribution lets you check whether the cut was drawn to admit exactly the pages we already wanted to write.
- Does a high co-mention count mean the conditions are related?
- No, and we are careful about this. Two conditions named in one comment may be compared, confused, or simply listed. We use these counts to decide what to write about, never as evidence that two conditions are biologically linked.
- Can I have more than one of these at once?
- For most of these pairs, yes. Several are recognised as co-occurring more often than chance predicts. That is why we frame these pages as telling two things apart rather than as choosing between them.
- Why can symptoms not tell these conditions apart?
- Because the symptom profiles overlap almost completely. The main clinical guideline in this area states that no single symptom can be specifically attributed to the one condition that does have a test, which sets a hard ceiling on symptom-based reasoning.
Related
Every query behind these 36 numbers is published on the corpus page, along with the term lists, the limitations, and what a Reddit-derived count cannot tell you about the general population.