the.com/indigestion
your gut filing a formal complaint after you ignored every warning sign
means discomfort, pain, or a feeling of fullness in the upper abdomen that follows eating, often blamed on a meal that didn't sit right.
from From Latin indigestio, built from the negative prefix in- ("not") plus digestus, the past participle of digerere — literally "to carry apart, to separate, to dissolve" (di- "apart" + gerere "to carry"). So digestion is the body sorting food into its parts; indigestion is that sorting gone wrong. The word arrived in English through Old French in the late medieval period, when physicians still framed the gut in terms of "concoction" — the idea that the stomach cooked food like a small internal kitchen, and a failed cooking left you queasy.
- medical name
- called dyspepsia, from Greek for bad digestion
- no ulcer needed
- most cases have no detectable physical cause
- stress fuels it
- anxiety can trigger or worsen symptoms directly
- common guest
- affects roughly one in four people regularly
- midnight betrayal
- lying down soon after eating makes it worse
acid reflux disease — affects 20% of americans weekly, caused by stomach acid backing into esophagus
irritable bowel syndrome — impacts 10-15% of global population with chronic digestive symptoms
lactose intolerance — affects 65% of humans post-childhood due to lactase enzyme deficiency