Complaints & connections · borters.ch
The shape and colour of stool give a simple, honest look at digestion.
Also known as: stool form · Bristol scale · constipation · diarrhoea · blood in stool
Open in the tool — with search and all the links →This compilation is for information and replaces neither medical diagnosis nor treatment. If you have symptoms, see a doctor.
Stool quietly reveals how digestion is doing — and the Bristol scale makes that concrete, without embarrassment. It ranks form from hard (1) to liquid (7); types 3 and 4 are comfortable everyday. Upward mostly just means: more water, fibre and movement. It varies for everyone, a single day says little. Colour is normally brown. What really matters: black tarry or blood-red stool, or persistently pale, clay-coloured stool — that deserves a calm medical look. Tap a shape on the graphic.
Walks get the bowel moving.
A fixed, relaxed time and no rush help the reflex.
Fibre needs water, otherwise it hardens.
Type 5 to 6 over weeks with a striking smell suggests giardia. Threadworms are occasionally seen as short white threads on the stool.
Only tapeworm segments and pinworms are visible. Eggs and single-celled organisms need the microscope or an antigen test — so a normal-looking stool does not mean clear.
What looks like a flat piece of pasta and moves are tapeworm segments. They often appear with no other complaint and belong in the laboratory, because the species decides the treatment.
Pinworm eggs are almost never in the stool sample — they lie outside. The adhesive strip in the morning is the test, repeated on three days.
The Bristol scale has seven forms: one and two stand for too slow a passage, six and seven for too fast, three to five count as unremarkable. Normal is anything between three times a day and three times a week — the range is wider than most assume. Passage from mouth to exit takes on average twenty to fifty hours in adults. A change in form that lasts longer than two to four weeks is the point at which it is looked into.
Type 3–4 is ideal. Hard/lumpy (1–2) = constipation, mushy/liquid (6–7) = too loose. Gentle levers: water, fibre, movement, rest.
Brown is normal (greenish after lots of veg). Black-tarry or red can be blood, persistently pale/clay-coloured can point to bile/liver — check both.
Visible blood, black tarry stool, persistently pale stool, unintended weight loss, or a change lasting weeks: please get it checked.
From 3×/day to 3×/week is all normal as long as you feel well. Travel, stress and food shift it constantly.
A stool test showing bowel inflammation — useful with persistently changed stool.
The main lever for a comfortable form — increase slowly.
Iron tablets turn the stool black — glossy black, not tarry and without a change in smell. Knowing this saves a fright; not knowing it sends the search to the wrong place.
Also turns the stool black and binds medicines and nutrients along the way. Two hours apart from everything else is the minimum, and taken over weeks it is not meant as a standing remedy.
The one remedy that works in both directions: it forms stool that is too loose and softens stool that is too hard. 5–10 g a day with plenty of water, worked up over 1–2 weeks.
Effective when deficient; effects on sleep and stress plausible but moderate. Too much causes loose stool.
The thyroid helps set the pace of the gut: underactivity slows to constipation, overactivity speeds up to loose stool. A stubborn constipation with no other reason is a good occasion for the value.
Most of the body’s serotonin sits not in the head but in the gut wall, where it steers the movement. That is why some antidepressants change the stool at the start.
Between meals a cleaning wave runs through the gut, set off by this hormone. It needs gaps between meals — constant snacking interrupts it.
Yoghurt, kefir, sauerkraut — many guts like them.