As many of you may know I cut my teeth, jobwise, as a market researcher. You know one of those poor saps who tries to persuade you to take part in a survey when you would much rather be having your dinner.

In fact in my later years in the trade a worked in the field of healthcare. This meant that I have to persuade people with particular conditions, caregivers, doctors, nurses and a whole bunch of other people to give us their valuable time to tell us what they think about a whole raft of products and services.

Since then I’ve been working, among other things, on this blog. One of its objectives has been to support various healthcare awareness initiatives.

So today is one of the odd occasions where the strands of my working life come together.

How so – I hear you cry?

We as you can see from the headline of this blog this month is Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month.

Well the International Foundation for Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders (IFFGD) has decided to run some research this month. The aim of the research is to answer the question:

“Have you had bad or good experiences being treated for your bowel symptoms by your health care provider?”

You can take part by clicking here http://www.aboutibs.org/pages/1228. Indeed we would encourage anybody who has IBS to participate. The more knowledge we have then the better the quality of care!

Couple of things.

Firstly we have no affiliation with IFFGD. We only discovered the survey when we were doing some research for this blog post and decided to make it the main feature.

If you would like some more information on the early signs and symptoms of IBS please check out our blog post here – https://patienttalk.org/irritable-bowel-syndrome-what-are-the-signs-and-symptoms-of-ibs-and-how-can-we-treat-it/

Oh – the IFFGD describe themselves as follows “IFFGD is a nonprofit education and research organization that addresses issues surrounding life with functional gastrointestinal (GI) and motility disorders. Founded in 1991, IFFGD helps improve care by enhancing awareness, educating, and supporting research into treatments and cures for GI disorders. “