Please go to see a doctor mummyt. That simply isn't normal. I'm not saying the doctor will listen straight away, but unless they've done tests already, don't be put off. I have considered, and avoided, posting on this thread many times but I'm going to, because if I can save one person some money they don't need to spend or get one person to push their doctor harder, it's worth the inevitable criticism.
I was told at age 18 by one doctor that I had IBS and period pain, by another that it was all in my head and there was nothing wrong with me.
I did some of those tests at a health food shop, they came back I was intolerant to dairy.
I went back to the doctors, they did their own test (the only test they ever actually did until I collapsed) and said I wasn't, gave me more IBS pills and more or less said I was a hypochondriac.
Fast forward ten years, I ended up getting rushed to hospital and they finally decided it might not be IBS and did some proper tests
. Long story short, I had a life threatening complication to a disease I'd been walking around with the whole time. A simple test at any point would have alerted them to it.
Some things I have found out:
1) IBS should be the last diagnosis, not the first. It's only diagnosis is by eliminating everything else. Sure, such symptoms are more likely to be IBS than anything else, but is that really good enough? Some doctors even say there really is no one illness called IBS. It's just a catch-all name for a number of symptoms that they can't find a cause of. That's partly why people with IBS can have such different symptoms, and why they can respond to treatment so differently. Trouble is, GPs don't like referring people for expensive treatment. At the very least they should do a stool test (icky and embarrassing, I know, but...)
2) Those tests you have to pay for are iffy at best. The one I took told me I was intolerant to dairy and various other stuff when I wasn't, but ironically managed to miss the intolerance to some fruit acids that I do actually suffer from. The NHS does not actually recognise the 'science' Yorktest et al actually use, because there is no immunological or clinical evidence behind it. In fact, they had to stop saying that their tests were 'clinically vaildated' or boasted 'scientific expertise and reliability' - because they weren't and they didn't.
3) If you go to a health food shop or nutritionist and tell you that you have a bona fide illness, they'll refuse to serve you. Seriously. In conversation I told the woman in a certain high-street health shop (who, as it happens, offer YorkTest as a service) what I had and she told me they had nothing to treat 'proper' illness with and that I should go back to my doctor. As it happens, I am a big believer in some alternative medicines, as long as you understand the cause of the symptoms and the remedy is backed by research.