The panel’s criteria, published in The Journal of Family Practice this February, include recurrent abdominal pain or discomfort for at least six months.

Tests are indicated if a patient’s symptoms began after age 50, if there is a family history of inflammatory bowel disease or cancer, or if the patient has blood in the stool, fever, jaundice, a weight loss of more than 10 per cent, anaemia, symptoms that occur during the night, extreme abdominal tenderness, enlargement of an abdominal organ or profuse diarrhoea.

In the journal, Dr Neil T Moynihan and his co-authors emphasised that in the absence of the above “red flags”, “extensive testing, including the routine use of blood tests, stool studies, and imaging is not required”.

Apart from drugs, they noted that hypnotherapy helped “even those whose conditions were refractory to other forms of therapy”.

They pointed out that while there may be no cure for IBS, symptom relief is possible for most, if not all, patients.