It is all so simple to the patient. What does he care wether the technical name is nervous indigestion or appendicitis or colitis? To him the important thing is the gas and how to get rid of it. Ah! There's the rub, as Shakespeare once said and there is precisely where the diagnosis and treatment of intestinal troubles begins.

People in general tend to oversimplify all their health problems, sometimes in a way that is almost funny. Every pain in the head is a headache. Every pain in the abdomen is a stomach ache and every stomach ache is "stomach trouble." Yet in that one area alone there might be dozens of ailments in no way related to the stomach.