Using artificial intelligence to understand irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia syndrome

Modern medicine is based on the concept of disease. Each disease has its own unique and specific pathophysiology – meaning that each disease has a biological fault that defines that disease and only that disease. Functional disorders (e.g., irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia syndrome) are problematic in that no specific pathophysiology has been discovered, though the search goes on. There are a number of biological abnormalities associated with functional disorders, but they are often shared between the different functional disorders, they are not always found, and they do not uniquely define any particular functional disorder. Additionally, patients with functional disorders are polysymptomatic and the symptoms of one disorder tend to overlap to some degree with those of another disorder, leading the description of spectrum disorders.