Conclusion
This study provided an opportunity to let the person with chronic GI illness shine through. If we wish to establish a truly patient-centered visit for chronic GI patients, care teams will need to re-think how each individual patient's story is shared with the healthcare team and used to develop a personalized treatment plan. In such visits, not so dissimilar from the focus groups reported here, patients could gather, share, learn, and interact with skilled, empathic clinicians. The conversations might reveal that for some patients, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) would do just as much good as additional pharmaceuticals. Such a model might help to capture the depth and richness of the patient experience while acknowledging the many practical demands and time constraints of contemporary medical practice. The need to engage each patient as a unique individual with his or her own rich set of life experiences is as critical today as it was over a century ago when William Osler reminded us that, "It is as important to know the person who has the disease as it is to know the disease the person has."