Alien Guts? Exploring Lives of and with Irritable Bowels in Denmark

Understanding Gut Sensations: Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Diagnostic Fluidity in Danish Clinical Practice

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a prevalent health challenge in a Danish welfare context. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at two Danish gastroenterology clinics, and inspired by Charles E. Rosenberg's idea of styles of explaining widespread diseases, we outline three styles of understanding and treating gut trouble in daily clinical work: "The microbial gut," "the mindful gut," and "the lifestyled gut." Moreover, we suggest the concept of fluidity to characterize IBS as a diagnostic category that allows clinicians and patients to operate through complex understandings of permeable boundaries between body, mind, and environment to negotiate personalized solutions for embodied gut sensations.

Like clockwork? (Re)imagining rhythms and routines when living with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)

Temporal trajectories of health, illness and disability-from biographical change to micro-embodied practices within social time-are important strands within medical sociology and disability studies. Drawing upon a UK-based qualitative study using diaries and follow-up interviews to explore everyday life with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this article explores routines when living with the condition. It focuses specifically on accounts of routines being anticipated, slowed down and stretched out to accommodate and/or care for bodies, with personal and social rhythms weaved in, out and with each other. Such reflections are told through participants' accounts of knowing routines and rhythms, stretching out and pacing morning routines to care for the body and how everyday practices are reimagined as the body and the social meet. Drawing upon the concept of 'Crip Time' where the social bends to meet with the body, this article seeks to illuminate important intersections between medical sociology and disability studies through accounts of living with IBS. This article demonstrates the entanglement of structural, disabling temporal rhythms and embodied temporalities, through an acknowledgement of routines reimagined. It offers a contribution to both medical sociology and disability studies in reimagining social lives with embodied temporalities in mind.