If you’re dealing with digestive symptoms, I understand how uncomfortable and worrying they can be. The root cause is often difficult to pinpoint, which is why many people try several things, medical, dietary and herbal, before finding me, often without much improvement.
Digestive symptoms have a way of quietly shrinking your life. Planning routes around bathrooms, declining meals out, the embarrassment that makes you want to disappear when symptoms strike at the wrong moment. Some people pull back from intimacy, or stop travelling, or simply stay closer to home than they’d like to. If your body has started to feel like the thing running your calendar rather than you, that exhaustion is real, and it’s exactly what needs to change.
As a digestive health naturopath in London, I look for which of several underlying drivers, SIBO, motility, microbiome, histamine, is actually behind an IBS diagnosis. I take an individual approach, assessing you as a whole person and working to address the underlying factors driving or worsening your digestive symptoms, rather than treating the presentation in isolation.
What the evidence actually points to
IBS is a description, not a single cause
A diagnosis of IBS, once serious causes have been ruled out through the proper investigations, is real and useful, but it tells you what’s happening, not why. Underneath that label sits a range of different drivers, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, visceral hypersensitivity, disrupted gut motility, an altered microbiome, or a gut-brain axis that’s become dysregulated through chronic stress. Two people with the same IBS diagnosis can need entirely different approaches, which is why the label alone is rarely enough to work from.
GLP-1 medications and gut function
If you’re on semaglutide, tirzepatide or a similar GLP-1 medication, gastrointestinal side effects are extremely common and not a sign that anything has gone wrong. Nausea, constipation, reflux and delayed gastric emptying are well recognised effects of how these medications work, not a separate problem layered on top. For many people these ease as the body adjusts or the dose stabilises, though rare but more serious complications have been reported in individual cases, which is why persistent or worsening symptoms should always be flagged to your prescriber rather than assumed to be routine.
Where I see people get this wrong
The first mistake is stopping at the label. An IBS diagnosis is often handed over with dietary advice and, sometimes, medication to speed up or slow down transit, with no investigation into which of the underlying drivers is actually present in your case.
The second is treating diet as the only lever, sometimes the main driver genuinely is dietary, but restrictive diets such as low FODMAP used alone and indefinitely can also narrow your diet, affect your microbiome, and never touch a bacterial, motility or stress-driven cause underneath.
The third, increasingly common now, is missing that a GLP-1 medication has changed the picture. New digestive symptoms after starting one of these drugs get investigated as if they came from nowhere, when the medication itself is very often the explanation.
How I work with digestive health
If red flag symptoms haven’t already been investigated, that comes first, I work alongside your GP or gastroenterologist, not instead of them. From there, I start with a detailed case history and functional testing, stool analysis, SIBO breath testing, histamine and motility assessment where relevant, to work out which driver or combination of drivers is actually present.
I then build a plan around your specific case, dietary changes, targeted supplements and herbal medicine, hyperbaric oxygen or red light therapy to reduce inflammation and discomfort, or abdominal massage techniques for constipation and bloating. If you’re on a GLP-1 medication, I work alongside it, supporting gut motility, nutrient absorption and hydration, not questioning the medication itself, and I’ll flag anything that needs medical review.
If this sounds like where you are, apply for a 15 minute consultation and let’s work out the best way forward.
