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It is frustrating how slow medical progress is with respect to gut biota and such personalized medicine. This seems like the perfect place for machine learning

It is frustrating how slow medical progress is with respect to gut biota and such personalized medicine. This seems like the perfect place for machine learning and big data. What exactly is the hold up? Is it regulations? Is it old fashioned doctors unwilling to push boundaries? Ive been dealing with mysterious stomach issues for a long time myself, and I'm living for the day where I can hack something together to cure myself, at this point I've lost faith in doctors; and my problems in the grand scheme of things aren't even that bad, I can only imagine how other hackers must feel... Edit: I've been getting my own ML startup off the ground just recently, but if anyone is doing something in this area, even open source, I may be interested in collaborating, let's talk!

vymague 9y ago
But aren't all medical progress pretty slow? Human body is complex and research is expensive.
ianai 9y ago
This place is trying: https://viome.com/ https://viome.com/ My guess is that human flora are orders of magnitude higher in complexity. They all interact with one another and diet. It’s hard to find numbers, but at least one place indicated over 500 different strains in the human gut.
- zxcb1 9y ago
  This type of analysis will probably be a cornerstone in future health assessment. Since there are more cells and genes in the microbiome than in the human body, it seems reasonable that different compositions may have profound effects. Untangling this might take a while, meanwhile, changes in food production, environmental degradation and pollution are probably affecting microbial “landscapes” in detrimental ways. For now, options are limited to experimenting with diets, switching to organic alternatives, and the most radical method, temporarily change environment to isolate or eliminate the causes. All these more or less worked for me, the last one most effective, restoring a dysfunctional gut flora, however not permanently which speaks for environmental factors beyond diet.
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
One of the prime suspects here runs into an extremely influential entrenched forces with an interesting against this sort of work. For instance nearly all foodstuffs of various sorts in the US today are treated with glyphosate both as an herbicide and as a crop desiccant. On the latter part even various cereals and wheats are generally treated with glyphosate just before harvest to work as a dessicant, or drying agent (which, as an aside, is where the hypothesis that 'gluten sensitivity' is actually a response to glyphosate comes from). The most important point here is that while the impact of such is debate, it is not debated that glyphosate has a substantial and not entirely clear impact on gut bacteria. Monsanto reacts extremely aggressively against any publication, from anybody, suggesting any potential issue with their products. For instance when the World Health Organization indicated that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen, even they came under sustained aggressive assaults from Monsanto's PR and 'approved science' machine. That sort of pressure is something that, if you're a researcher who's not ideologically driven, is going to work as a major deterrent. And of course it's entirely possible that glyphosate is not the cause here, but it's something that you presumably would want to extensively research first and foremost due to its ubiquitousness and interactions with gut flora, yet that's not really happening, on the scale it should be, outside of studies with major conflicts of interests. -------- EDIT: One quick addendum. The reason I jumped from analyzing gut bacteria in and of itself to examining outside players is because your gut biome is going to a product of environmental factors. So it's not so much the biome that matters as how we are changing it, unless you assume that there has been no real change in incidence rates over the decades but simply more widespread reporting - which is certainly possible and something that would also need to be investigated.
kk58 9y ago
As a fellow ML enthusiast with similar stomach mysteries. I discovered a year ago i had a reaction to milk which resulted chronic hyperacidity and eczema. I silently suffered from this condition for a decade and half. A month ago i discovered this was a product of A1 protein in milk. A2 milk doesnt hurt me as much. Basically eating clean and eating smart seems the only way out coupled with yoga. Yoga seems to help all these conditions. It seems yoga needs to be studied more from a scientific purpose to see why it works

vymague 9y ago

But aren't all medical progress pretty slow? Human body is complex and research is expensive.

ianai 9y ago

This place is trying: https://viome.com/ https://viome.com/ My guess is that human flora are orders of magnitude higher in complexity. They all interact with one another and diet. It’s hard to find numbers, but at least one place indicated over 500 different strains in the human gut.

zxcb1 9y ago
This type of analysis will probably be a cornerstone in future health assessment. Since there are more cells and genes in the microbiome than in the human body, it seems reasonable that different compositions may have profound effects. Untangling this might take a while, meanwhile, changes in food production, environmental degradation and pollution are probably affecting microbial “landscapes” in detrimental ways. For now, options are limited to experimenting with diets, switching to organic alternatives, and the most radical method, temporarily change environment to isolate or eliminate the causes. All these more or less worked for me, the last one most effective, restoring a dysfunctional gut flora, however not permanently which speaks for environmental factors beyond diet.

TangoTrotFox 9y ago

One of the prime suspects here runs into an extremely influential entrenched forces with an interesting against this sort of work. For instance nearly all foodstuffs of various sorts in the US today are treated with glyphosate both as an herbicide and as a crop desiccant. On the latter part even various cereals and wheats are generally treated with glyphosate just before harvest to work as a dessicant, or drying agent (which, as an aside, is where the hypothesis that 'gluten sensitivity' is actually a response to glyphosate comes from). The most important point here is that while the impact of such is debate, it is not debated that glyphosate has a substantial and not entirely clear impact on gut bacteria. Monsanto reacts extremely aggressively against any publication, from anybody, suggesting any potential issue with their products. For instance when the World Health Organization indicated that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen, even they came under sustained aggressive assaults from Monsanto's PR and 'approved science' machine. That sort of pressure is something that, if you're a researcher who's not ideologically driven, is going to work as a major deterrent. And of course it's entirely possible that glyphosate is not the cause here, but it's something that you presumably would want to extensively research first and foremost due to its ubiquitousness and interactions with gut flora, yet that's not really happening, on the scale it should be, outside of studies with major conflicts of interests. -------- EDIT: One quick addendum. The reason I jumped from analyzing gut bacteria in and of itself to examining outside players is because your gut biome is going to a product of environmental factors. So it's not so much the biome that matters as how we are changing it, unless you assume that there has been no real change in incidence rates over the decades but simply more widespread reporting - which is certainly possible and something that would also need to be investigated.

kk58 9y ago

As a fellow ML enthusiast with similar stomach mysteries. I discovered a year ago i had a reaction to milk which resulted chronic hyperacidity and eczema. I silently suffered from this condition for a decade and half. A month ago i discovered this was a product of A1 protein in milk. A2 milk doesnt hurt me as much. Basically eating clean and eating smart seems the only way out coupled with yoga. Yoga seems to help all these conditions. It seems yoga needs to be studied more from a scientific purpose to see why it works