Book excerpt: The MDCP will bring knowledge to clinicians beyond the diagnostic criteria: to provide guidelines about the clinical profile of individual patients that will help in selecting more focused treatment options. The current diagnostic criteria for functional GI disorders helps to classify patients for research studies. However, it does not capture the full dimensionality of a patient's clinical profile. For example an IBS patient seen in primary care may be treated quite differently from a patient with the same diagnosis seen at a major medical center, the latter having with more severe symptoms, psychological co-morbidities or more severe physiological disturbances. Therefore the multi-dimensional clinical profile permits an ability to characterize the patient not only in terms of the diagnosis as currently exists but also in terms of any clinical modifiers (e.g., IBS-C, D, or M), the impact of the condition (mild, moderate or severe), the presence of any psychosocial modifiers, or the degree of physiological dysfunction and biomarkers. This will help to direct the type and degree of treatments .