Trust Your Gut is a new public awareness campaign launched by the American Gastroenterological Association that seeks to improve how patients initiate contact with clinicians after the onset of bowel symptoms. The AGA also released new statistics that show nearly 40% Americans have refrained from everyday activities like exercising (19%), running errands (17%), or socializing with family and friends (16%) because they were uncomfortable with their bowel symptoms. Despite these sundry impacts, many are still unwilling to engage in conversation with a medical professional about their problems. In fact, one in three state that they would only talk about their bowel symptoms if their doctor initiated the conversation.
Trust Your Gut comes at a critical time when 60-70 million Americans have gastrointestinal (GI) diseases which greatly affect their quality of life and can be diagnosed only by a health professional. Unfortunately, many patients choose to remain quiet about their digestive symptoms and delay visits to medical practitioners until the symptoms worsen to a more serious level.
Outdated views concerning the discussion of bowel symptoms aid in the reluctance to bring up the issue with a healthcare professional. AGA’s survey found that symptoms and their treatment cause discomfort, with a staggering 15% of respondents preferring to argue politics with a family member rather than discuss bowel symptoms even with their doctor, alongside 22% who would like to discuss their body weight. An extra 25% claimed they would attempt self-medication through the usage of over-the-counter medications (22%) instead of scheduling an appointment with a medical professional.
“We need to change how we treat the discussion of GI symptoms and normal GI health with patients,” said Rajeev Jain, MD, AGAF, board certified gastroenterologist, Texas Digestive Disease Consultants in Dallas, AGA Patient Education Advisor, and Trust Your Gut spokesman. “That involves giving the patients the ability to understand the term normal, what questions they need to ask, and the duration between the provider’s symptom to patient dialogue need to be cut down.”
Trust Your Gut motivates its patients to report bowel issues, understand their ‘normal’, and seek assistance from a medical professional rather than try to resolve it themselves. For further details check out: https://patient.gastro.org/TrustYourGut
The AGA has lost trust in the GI community. Ever since its inception in 1897, its advocacy spanning over a century has been trusted and of value, as it now consists of more than 16,000 worldwide members from every corner having interest and dedication in some dimension of gastroenterology. The AGA Institute manages the administrative side of the practices, research, and educational facilities offered by the organization. www.gastro.org
Kelton conducted the survey Trust Your Gut on behalf of the AGA and it was qualitatively capped at 1,010 responses from their targeted audience of adults which were aged 18 and older. Between the dates of May 9 and 11 of 2022, the survey was conducted. For families with an adult individual representative over the age of 18, it is highly likely 95 out of 100 times that the survey results have no change which is greater than 3.0 percentage points considering what results would have been achieved if all representatives from the sample were chosen for interviews. The subgroups margin of error would most certainly be greater.