Many people with IBS also experience nausea or even vomiting. When this happens, they are almost always tied to the same cause. So, let’s talk about how and why that can happen.

If you are reading this, then I’m guessing that you are someone who has experience both IBS symptoms and nausea at some point. I’ve seen a lot of this in my 25-year career, and I wanted to explain why this happens.

Let’s do a little background on how the digestive system and health care works so that we can all better appreciate and understand how these two seemingly unrelated issues are much more alike than many people realize.

IBS is generally thought of as a lower digestive tract issue, or a middle and lower digestive tract issue. It always involves includes one or more of the following symptoms: diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, gas or bloating.

People often don’t believe me when I say that, but it only requires any one of those symptoms. You don’t have to have diarrhea, and you don’t have to have abdominal pain in order to have IBS.

Nause and vomiting are of course upper digestive tract symptoms. The symptoms are felt in the stomach, and things are coming back up, not stuck in the middle or coming out the other end.

But these distinctions between the upper and lower digestive system are distinctions that humans make for convenience, so that we can describe what we are feeling and what is happening.

In reality those distinctions aren’t so clear within the body. And those symptoms aren’t connected to any one cause. There are lots of causes for IBS, and lots of causes for nausea and vomiting.

And a lot of those causes overlap, meaning that a lot of things that can cause nausea or vomiting, can also cause IBS and symptoms included in IBS.  

The upper and the lower digestive tract are all part of the same digestive tract. They are all part of the same tube that is running through you from your mouth to your anus.

And that tube contains an ecosystem, which we call a microbiome.

Problems can happen anywhere within that tube, and symptoms can manifest anywhere within that tube.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of causes and how this happens.

People who are sensitive or allergic to gluten can experience a variety of symptoms. Those symptoms can include any of the following: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, gas, and bloating.

Some people get one, some people get another. Some don’t get any of those symptoms. But any of them could be caused by a gluten sensitivity.

The same is true for a bacterial overgrowth, or a candida overgrowth.

Either of those things can be happening anywhere along the length of your approximately 30-foot-long digestive tract, and they can cause any of those symptoms.

We like to think of these symptoms as being associated with one or two causes. But the body isn’t nearly that simple. These symptoms are simply telling us that something is wrong down there.

And in a lot of cases (most in my experience) when people are suffering from lower digestive problems and upper digestive problems, the cause is usually the same, and all of those symptoms usually get better together.

Unfortunately, the few causes that I mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of things that can cause these symptoms, but the good news is that a good IBS specialist will be able to help you figure out what the cause is and help you solve both your IBS and your nausea or vomiting.

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