I entirely agree with your point - antibiotics have literally saved my life (no exaggeration) more than once. I simply try to avoid oral antibiotics if possible because they do wreak such havoc on my gut and managing my IBD is sometimes preferable to the minor things antibiotics might be (have been) prescribed for (which I shall not go into). I do not always avoid them, out of any principle - not at all - merely do so on selected occasions where it is possible. Sometimes it is not possible.
I speak entirely personally, and advise others to treat antibiotics as the miracle they are.
Partial recollection of a poem I “wrote” in a dream many, many years ago; I occasionally do that. Asking why won’t help. (Related to the debatable proposition that the laugh-tracks heard in 1960s sitcoms were actually sourced from 1930s radio show live audiences, therefore the laughter heard in 1960s sitcoms were those of dead people.)
Are they 'live or are they dead.
If dead, then what are we to do.
Should we come forward and be bled;
For poisonous humors may accrue.
I vaguely ‘felt’ that there were two more stanzas, but…
The ancient Greeks seem to have not been far wrong in terms of where thought resides. I am reminded of the phrenes from whence comes frenetic activity - apparently it’s not all in the mind.
Here is a passage I just blagged from the Kosmos Society:
[> This month’s Core Vocab word is phrēn , plural phrenes , [φρήν, φρένες] which is given the definition ‘physical localization of the thūmos ‘.[1] As a reminder, the definition of thūmos is ‘heart, spirit’ (designates realm of consciousness, of rational and emotional functions); we have already looked at some passages relating to thūmos : you can find the post here, and the forum discussion here. In modern English we refer to the mind as residing in the brain, and emotion is often referred to in connection with the heart and sometimes the gut; in ancient Greek both functions are referred to as residing in the phrēn or phrenes which equates to the midriff.](https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/?p=25060)
Also, I see no mention of pro or even pre-biotics in the discussion. My thinking is that a good course of kefir would go a long way to rectifying IBD.
Mainstream neurology’s position is that the mind is an emergent property of the physical structure of the brain. Dualism is religious notion with no scientific evidence to support it. That does not exclude other biological functions affecting psychology- of course they do. Your adrenal glands and hormones, for example, have lots to do with your state of mind.
The headline of this BB post is actively misleading. The linked article is a puff piece about a biotech startup, not a statement of any scientific findings about a “psychobiome”. There’s lots of interesting research findings about links between gut biome and other body functions, and it’s certainly the topic du jour in pop science right now, but this BB headline is exactly how bad science information spreads. People read a headline like that, maybe skim BB’s summary of the article which is itself a bunch of uncritical quotes from the PR person at a startup, and those people go off believing “psychobiome” is definitely a real thing.
Science reporting is already hard. Posts like this make it harder.
I have friends who recommend this, but it always makes me wonder. There are probably hundreds or thousands or more, of bacteria, yeasts, molds, and other microbes in our gut. Why do you think the ones in the yogurt, or pickles, that you are ingesting are the ones that are helpful?
And different yogurts have different bacteria, different fermented foods have different ones, even different batches of the same foods have different varieties of microbes. Sourdough bread is known to have different flavors based on where the starter was cultured, because of the microbes that get in from the air in that particular batch’s environment. So I’m just curious how you can cultivate a beneficial microbiome when there are so many unknowns, and how do you know if what you are ingesting is helping or hurting?
From reading about it, and about things like probiotics, and recognising my diet was too limited in these respects, and noting that fermented foods may contain probiotic bacteria, and the 'old wives tale 'about drinking a tablespoon of vinegar a day, and a long list of other bits and pieces of anecdote and research (including re faecal transplants) and especially because after 30 years of severe IBD (Crohn’s Disease) the drugs were still only a partial palliative, and (shall I go on?) … so I tried it - and the effect was dramatic.
I made no other significant changes to my diet, yet my symptoms became and remained almost non-existent most of the time. I won’t go into all the exact detail related to those symptoms and how they changed, given that describing some of them would probably be beyond some people’s ‘ick’ factor.
And when I stop eating these foods for any significant period, or when I eat processed foods as opposed to fresh foods (which I have been doing for longer than I’ve been eating pickled/fermented etc for ) my symptoms change back. And when I take oral antibiotics symptoms change back very much for the worse and extremely dramatically.
It’s quite hard to conduct a double-blind trial on myself but different diets have - over a significant period of time - resulted in very different severities of symptoms.
ETA for what it’s worth I also always eat the rind on cheeses. I do my best to diversify my gut bacteria as much as possible and leave them and my gut to figure out how to keep a balance, which they now seem to do. I’ll grant that diversity is likely as important as particular types. But not having particular types (like eating no fermented/pickled) limits diversity considerably, I’m sure.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say; if it works for you that’s great. I also wonder if the same formula would work for everyone, or if different people have different needs in this area and the same foods/microbes would not be helpful to all people, or the same person at different times in their life.
You have a point about the article. And yes, the linked article says they plan to “capitalize on” - which is what biotech start-ups do. But what they plan to capitalize on is "growing evidence from epidemiological and animal studies that link gut bacteria to conditions as diverse as autism, anxiety, and Alzheimer’s disease.
So these people are working in a field where much other research is ongoing and no doubt with knowledge of other relevant research. Here’s a couple of relevant studies - though the same people are involved in each, here. The concept of the “brain-gut axis” is becoming more widely accepted as something that deserves more research and has been inferred to exist, from research to date.
In particular, in one of the studies below, researchers were looking at both a brain-gut direction of disease activity and a gut-brain direction of disease activity.
Diversity in people suggests you may be correct. But there is likely a core set of bacteria that may be a pre-requisite for a healthy gut for everyone. Whatever the actual mix per individual, I strongly believe the key feature for ALL individuals is diversity of gut bacteria. Something many elements of the modern ‘western’ diet tend to conspire to reduce.
I have a colleague that studies the role of the microbiome in personality, mainly autism spectrum (I hate the idea of calling someone’s personality a “disorder”). A few years back when their first data on gut bacteria started coming out, no one believed it. I was certainly very skeptical. The data was just too clear to ignore, though. They showed striking changes in social behavior of mice caused by either changes to diet or direct change of the gut bacteria. Further some changes were inherited; we are born with gut bacteria from our mothers and changes in maternal diet caused epigentic changes in offspring through the gut biome.
Biology has always been complicated by the vast interdependencies, but every year we’re discovering that it is even more so
And Western medicine was - and largely still is - run by those who believed in it, and had it shape their scientific model (or at least their interpretation of it) even if unconsciously. (Especially since that dualism is so core to the Abrahamic notions of the self - it’s very hard to shake.) The entire history of science is about practitioners reconciling their existing irrational beliefs with the evidence, and that’s still true, but that’s still especially true in medicine. There’s a whole lot of medical beliefs that aren’t even based on scientific evidence, just tradition, and in some cases we actually know to be untrue but are still actively taught.
As a result, as you say, the “mind” gets treated as an emergent property of the physical structure of the brain, which is seen as a discrete system, with everything else (e.g. hormones), only “influencing” it. Rather than seeing the brain as a part of a larger system that necessarily involves the entire body, from which the “mind” arises.
A little more than 7 years ago, I was prescribed high doses of three antibiotics to fight a staph infection in my left lung. What followed was 3+ years of misery, as my gut biome was essentially wiped out and nearly everything I ate gave me indigestion. I also suffered the longest sustained period of depression in many years. The depression has been addressed with anti-depressants, but I think it’s time to deal with the root cause.
Linked to this, of course, is the subject of diet, which – pace the right-wingers who carp about personal choices and responsibility and the “culture of poverty” – is an economic and social matter. As we learn more about the “psychobiome,” it will be interesting to expand the conversation to include sociologists, social workers, economists, and anti-poverty activists to talk about the relationship between economics, poverty, diet, the psychobiome, mental health, addiction, and the complex web of connections between them. The psychobiome might be “individual,” but diet is social, as are the effects of mental health, which are exacerbated by lack of medical care, poverty, and the powerlessness and inertia of being poor. The psychobiome, like all matters of personal health, exists within a social context.
I had a fleeting thought a few weeks ago about the validity of fecal transplantation as a therapy in Covid-19, but I’d forgotten it until you used the phrase. So thanks for that. People may be aware that the virus may be detected in your shit. Given that blood plasma from recovered patients is being employed with some success in those with serious Covid infections, it made me wonder if the same result may be obtained via fecal transplant. As it turns out there is research underway for that - in a roundabout fashion. This also makes interesting reading:
An ongoing outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China. 2019-nCoV has caused a cluster of pneumonia cases, and posed continuing epidemic threat to China and even global health. Unfortunately, there is currently no specific effective treatment for the viral infection and the related serious complications. It is in urgent need to find a new specific effective treatment for the 2019-nCoV infection. According to Declaration of Helsinki and International Ethical Guidelines for Health-related Research Involving Humans, the desperately ill patients with 2019-nCov infection during disease outbreaks have a moral right to try unvalidated medical interventions (UMIs) and that it is therefore unethical to restrict access to UMIs to the clinical trial context.
There is a vital link between the intestinal tract and respiratory tract, which was exemplified by intestinal complications during respiratory disease and vice versa. Some of these patients can develop secondary bacterial infections and antibiotic-associated diarrhea (AAD). The recent study on using washed microbiota transplantation (WMT) as rescue therapy in critically ill patients with AAD demonstrated the important clinical benefits and safety of WMT. Additionally, the recent animal study provided direct evidence supporting that antibiotics could decrease gut microbiota and the lung stromal interferon signature and facilitate early influenza virus replication in lung epithelia. Importantly, the above antibiotics caused negative effects can be reversed by fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) which suggested that FMT might be able to induce a significant improvement in the respiratory virus infection. Another evidence is that the microbiota could confer protection against certain virus infection such as influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus by priming the immune response to viral evasion. The above results suggested that FMT might be a new therapeutic option for the treatment of virus-related pneumonia. The methodology of FMT recently was coined as WMT, which is dependent on the automatic facilities and washing process in a laboratory room. Patients underwent WMT with the decreased rate of adverse events and unchanged clinical efficacy in ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. This clinical trial aims to evaluate the outcome of WMT combining with standard therapy for patients with novel coronavirus pneumonia, especially for those patients with dysbiosis-related conditions.
