3 ms·

It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in s

It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in some chronic, systemic disorders that are difficult to diagnose and treat. The standard wisdom was (and largely still is) that everyone has candida and it is only medically relevant in severely immunocompromised individuals. It is nice to see that researchers are starting to look more deeply into the fungal component of the microbiome and peripheral effects that fungi can have around the body beyond the classically studied and treated acute fungal infections. Although populations are less stable and are in smaller number than the bacteria and viruses, we carry an incredible load of these organisms in our bodies and they are constantly interacting with our microbiome and immune system: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(22)00203-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5... "Dysbiosis (ie, an imbalance in the composition of the microbial community, which includes loss of symbionts, outgrowth of pathobionts or opportunists, and disturbed inter-microbial competition and microbial diversity) of the gut mycobiota has been implicated in a number of diseases, spanning autoimmune, metabolic, and neurological disorders, and cancers. Colonisation and growth of opportunistic fungal pathogens in the gut can induce dysregulated host immune responses thereby influencing the disease course. In addition, gut fungi—particularly Candida spp—sophistically influence the assembly and function of the gut bacterial microbiome (another cardinal regulator of host physiology), through cellular contact, competition or collaboration for available nutrients, production of secondary metabolites and antimicrobial peptides, and physiochemical changes to the gut niche."

paulmd 3y ago
The denial over the role of gut microbiome in producing and modulating neurotransmitters seems like one of the biggest misses in modern science. People are in sheer and utter denial over the idea that some bacteria in the gut might actually affect what's going on in the brain, but now there are potential links to parkinsons and several other neurological disorders. It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome. You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing. But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries. This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right? People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).
- InSteady 3y ago
  Yup. Dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine have all been shown to be produced by microbes in the gut, including fungi in some cases. The gut-serotonin angle has been largely ignored because it does not cross the blood brain barrier, but this seems like an oversight due to oversimplification and a myopic view of the vast interconnectedness of the body's various systems. After all, tryptophan does cross the BBB and indeed it must do so in order to supply the body with precursor for endogenous serotonin production in the brain. To say nothing of serotonins many roles outside of the brain that are increasingly being uncovered (all 15 serotonin receptor types are expressed throughout the body, not just the brain). [Above is fairly well established in medical literature, the following is speculative:] Gut microbes may be out-competing "us" for dietary tryptophan, or, alternatively, inflammatory conditions in the GI may trigger the body to send the majority of free tryptophan down the kynurenine pathway, with little left over to make it up to the brain for endogenous neurotransmitter production.
- gehwartzen 3y ago
  I had a really bad bout of systemic c-diff causing colitis among other symptoms; and at one point I honestly felt like I was on deaths door. This occurred a few weeks after I was on antibiotics for something else. C-Diff is very resistant to antibiotics so if you kill off the other bacteria it outcompetes in ones system very quickly. There have been a ton of articles and studies that show fecal transplants (FMT) from a healthy donor are one of the most effective ways to cure an overgrowth of c-diff. I couldn't get a doctors appointment at a specialist for weeks and was desperate so read the studies and methodologies in detail and did it myself. The key is finding a healthy donor. I decided my 8 you son would be perfect as he is super healthy and generally has the same diet as I do. I won't go into all the details but suffice to say the basics involves a mixer, sample, and enema which you then retain for as long as possible (2+ hours ideally). It was the single most transformative medical treatment I have ever tried. Within a day or two symptoms were down I'd say 80% and within a week I was 100% better (which was confirmed a few weeks later when I finally got an appointment for blood testing and colonoscopy) Not only that I actually felt better than I had in years; consistent brain fog and ADHD symptoms alleviated as did some of my allergies. I was absolutely blown away. I strongly believe this will eventually be viewed as a go to treatment for all kinds of neurological and other pathological diseases. I could imagine donor samples being further refined to increase or decrease specific micro-organisms contained to better target specific illnesses. There are several companies that have developed fecal transplants that are conducted via pill form in which the outside is sterilized in order to get rid of the ick factor. >"It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters)." Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening) [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
> It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in some chronic, systemic disorders that are difficult to diagnose and treat. The problem is that if you are wrong a lot, people stop listening and will not hear you out when you are right. It is also not very helpful to be right about things when there is no way of telling when you are right or wrong.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Well if you look at it as a health care system with no oversight (Chinese and Indian), you’re going to get a lot of charlatans that peddle and make claims about anything. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of useful information that has filtered down through pure practice and error over two or three millenia of continuous use. It’s the perfect opportunity for the synthesis of rigorous science and time tried remedies.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    Of course we know there is a lot of potentially useful knowledge that came through practice over thousands of years. As I said, it is not useful to be right about things when you are also wrong a lot and you can't tell which things are wrong and which are right. Science gives us a way to sort wrong from right. Traditional medicine takes millenia of observation to arrive at simplest things that then can be easily forgotten or misused. Our "regular" medicine might be wrong a lot and sometimes might even be taking steps back. But overall it is moving in the right direction at a truly lightning speed. It only seem slow to us because of our impatience but, objectively, it has done gigantic progress within just one generation. Personally the more pressing matter is figuring out a way to make the state of the art medicine available to everybody.
    - aksss 3y ago
      > our impatience that plus greed and regulatory capture. That affects "regular" and "traditional" medicine both, of course.
bsder 3y ago
If I predict an earthquake in San Francisco "tomorrow" every single day, at some point, I will be correct. The problem with "naturopathic" treatments is that people forget that there are 4 outcomes--not 2. There is treated-got better, didn't treat-didn't get better. Then there are also treated-didn't get better and didn't treat-got better anyway. A treatment needs to show appropriate statistics in all 4 outcomes. "Treated-got better" loses a lot of its causative power when there are also a lot of "Treated-didn't get better", for example.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > If I predict an earthquake in San Francisco "tomorrow" every single day, at some point, I will be correct. Not quite the same issue, but a similar logical space: I sometimes give the example of someone living by a volcano and maintaining a sign that predicts it will not erupt today, claiming 100% accuracy. Thirty years later, it erupts, and they amend their sign: "99.99% accuracy". Point being that context and Bayesian prior probability are pretty important.

paulmd 3y ago

The denial over the role of gut microbiome in producing and modulating neurotransmitters seems like one of the biggest misses in modern science. People are in sheer and utter denial over the idea that some bacteria in the gut might actually affect what's going on in the brain, but now there are potential links to parkinsons and several other neurological disorders. It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome. You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing. But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries. This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right? People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).

InSteady 3y ago
Yup. Dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine have all been shown to be produced by microbes in the gut, including fungi in some cases. The gut-serotonin angle has been largely ignored because it does not cross the blood brain barrier, but this seems like an oversight due to oversimplification and a myopic view of the vast interconnectedness of the body's various systems. After all, tryptophan does cross the BBB and indeed it must do so in order to supply the body with precursor for endogenous serotonin production in the brain. To say nothing of serotonins many roles outside of the brain that are increasingly being uncovered (all 15 serotonin receptor types are expressed throughout the body, not just the brain). [Above is fairly well established in medical literature, the following is speculative:] Gut microbes may be out-competing "us" for dietary tryptophan, or, alternatively, inflammatory conditions in the GI may trigger the body to send the majority of free tryptophan down the kynurenine pathway, with little left over to make it up to the brain for endogenous neurotransmitter production.
gehwartzen 3y ago
I had a really bad bout of systemic c-diff causing colitis among other symptoms; and at one point I honestly felt like I was on deaths door. This occurred a few weeks after I was on antibiotics for something else. C-Diff is very resistant to antibiotics so if you kill off the other bacteria it outcompetes in ones system very quickly. There have been a ton of articles and studies that show fecal transplants (FMT) from a healthy donor are one of the most effective ways to cure an overgrowth of c-diff. I couldn't get a doctors appointment at a specialist for weeks and was desperate so read the studies and methodologies in detail and did it myself. The key is finding a healthy donor. I decided my 8 you son would be perfect as he is super healthy and generally has the same diet as I do. I won't go into all the details but suffice to say the basics involves a mixer, sample, and enema which you then retain for as long as possible (2+ hours ideally). It was the single most transformative medical treatment I have ever tried. Within a day or two symptoms were down I'd say 80% and within a week I was 100% better (which was confirmed a few weeks later when I finally got an appointment for blood testing and colonoscopy) Not only that I actually felt better than I had in years; consistent brain fog and ADHD symptoms alleviated as did some of my allergies. I was absolutely blown away. I strongly believe this will eventually be viewed as a go to treatment for all kinds of neurological and other pathological diseases. I could imagine donor samples being further refined to increase or decrease specific micro-organisms contained to better target specific illnesses. There are several companies that have developed fecal transplants that are conducted via pill form in which the outside is sterilized in order to get rid of the ick factor. >"It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters)." Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening) [1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438885/

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

> It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in some chronic, systemic disorders that are difficult to diagnose and treat. The problem is that if you are wrong a lot, people stop listening and will not hear you out when you are right. It is also not very helpful to be right about things when there is no way of telling when you are right or wrong.

huytersd 3y ago
Well if you look at it as a health care system with no oversight (Chinese and Indian), you’re going to get a lot of charlatans that peddle and make claims about anything. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of useful information that has filtered down through pure practice and error over two or three millenia of continuous use. It’s the perfect opportunity for the synthesis of rigorous science and time tried remedies.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Of course we know there is a lot of potentially useful knowledge that came through practice over thousands of years. As I said, it is not useful to be right about things when you are also wrong a lot and you can't tell which things are wrong and which are right. Science gives us a way to sort wrong from right. Traditional medicine takes millenia of observation to arrive at simplest things that then can be easily forgotten or misused. Our "regular" medicine might be wrong a lot and sometimes might even be taking steps back. But overall it is moving in the right direction at a truly lightning speed. It only seem slow to us because of our impatience but, objectively, it has done gigantic progress within just one generation. Personally the more pressing matter is figuring out a way to make the state of the art medicine available to everybody.
  - aksss 3y ago
    > our impatience that plus greed and regulatory capture. That affects "regular" and "traditional" medicine both, of course.

bsder 3y ago

If I predict an earthquake in San Francisco "tomorrow" every single day, at some point, I will be correct. The problem with "naturopathic" treatments is that people forget that there are 4 outcomes--not 2. There is treated-got better, didn't treat-didn't get better. Then there are also treated-didn't get better and didn't treat-got better anyway. A treatment needs to show appropriate statistics in all 4 outcomes. "Treated-got better" loses a lot of its causative power when there are also a lot of "Treated-didn't get better", for example.

Terr_ 3y ago
> If I predict an earthquake in San Francisco "tomorrow" every single day, at some point, I will be correct. Not quite the same issue, but a similar logical space: I sometimes give the example of someone living by a volcano and maintaining a sign that predicts it will not erupt today, claiming 100% accuracy. Thirty years later, it erupts, and they amend their sign: "99.99% accuracy". Point being that context and Bayesian prior probability are pretty important.