I'd never heard a single strain could affect constipation, so these results unsurprising. Where attention to the gut biome has really saved lives is when a per

I'd never heard a single strain could affect constipation, so these results unsurprising. Where attention to the gut biome has really saved lives is when a person has massive Clostridium difficile overgrowth – which is more associated with uncontrollable diarrhea than constipation. This state of extreme illness is typically only possible because prior antibiotic use cleared out the natural variety of commensal bacteria that normally keeps this particular strain at bay (or totally absent). In such cases, people near death can bounce back after a full-spectrum "fecal microbiome transplant" (FMT) where all of the hundreds-or-more of distinct bacterial species are transferred from a healthy donor to the patient. It's quite hard to package all those sensitive, beneficial, adapted-just-to-the-human-gut strains for reproducible evaluation & administration – so FMT is hard to fit into standard medical studies & FDA approval processes. But sometimes a mere dot's worth of a healthy person's feces can be a miracle cure for someone else! So, a company has driven an approval of their particular $10k-per-treatment shit-pill through FDA processes, and partially as a consequence, the FDA has been cracking down on people arranging FMTs in less-formal & far-cheaper ways – despite a great record of safety and effectiveness. A well-informed & highly-opinionated rant on this topic: "A Monopoly on Poop" https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/a-monopoly-on-poop https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/a-monopoly-on-poop