Alicec, I want to see the science done too. I just have these moments, like when I read the interview I linked to above where I get a sense of how much there is to know before we can be sure that we are intervening safely.
And how vastly oversimplified and misleading much of the information I have read (or heard from my doctors) has been and how dodgy the interventions I have taken have been.
re this point
When you adding or a couple of dozen species by taking a pill they are much less likely to find ecological niches. They are much less likely to survive in the gut.
I would think that they are also much more likely to behave unexpectedly when you are throwing them into an entirely new environment. I would expect that they would be much more likely to either switch on pathogenic genes or to cause existing bacteria to do the same.
That is all just assumption. We don't know because we have never been able to study it.
I understand the first half of my statement to be true. I am not an ecologist and have no training in it. But my understanding is that when a new animal or plant is introduced to an intact ecosystem the general rule is that it won't find a niche and become established.
There are exceptions, in New Zealand there were no plants that were good at colonising recently disturbed ground until blackberries were introduced. But I have only heard of it because I listened to a talk on the radio where an ecologist presented it as an exception.
I have read the case of the rabbit in Australia being presented as more usual. There were two or three unsuccessful attempts to introduce it into a reasonably intact ecosystem and then when it was introduced to a massively degraded ecosystem there was an overly successful one.
But have heard more than one ecologist state that a handful of bears or some other sort of animal being let loose in a foreign ecosystem will, even if they survive for a generation or two, most likely soon die out.
I have read of practitioners having issues trying to introduce beneficial bacteria to their patients guts, and have myself being such a patient.
So I do indeed assume that this is the case. Am I wrong? I mean wrong about the theory, no one knows about the practice as there is none yet.
For the second part, sure I do not know what the case is. We won't know until the experiment is done. That is kind of why I am expressing doubts rather than making statements.
But in that article that I linked to there is a section before the interview which starts with a quote from Philip Marsh
“It is a basic tenet of microbial ecology that a major change to an ecosystem produces a corresponding disturbance to the resident community,” he explained. “Examples of this have been reported in ecosystems as diverse as soil, skin, and water.”
As Marsh’s hypothesis gained adherents in the 1990s, periodontal research adapted a number of existing ecological terms. Most notably, dental plaque became a biofilm, a dynamic, polymicrobial community that, like lichens growing along a craggy coast, colonizes various and sundry pits, fissures, and other oral surfaces. From this ecological perspective, the way forward in periodontal research involved gaining a more detailed understanding of these microbial ecosystems, the environmental disturbances that destabilize them, and the opportunistic pathogens that exploit the imbalance to cause disease.
And from the interview with Jorge Frias-Lopez
What was most interesting about the new organisms?
There were a lot of organisms that are not considered at this point to be periodontal pathogens that were producing large numbers of putative virulence factors. I say, “putative” because this is based on homology.
Meaning the gene sequences, to various degrees, resemble known virulence factors?
Right. It may turn out that not all of them are virulence factors. But the huge number of them being produced suggests to me that the whole community is becoming more virulent, not just the Red Complex organisms. Somehow the new environment induces the production of these virulence factors in the whole community. It’s just a competition to make them. To me, that was the most surprising and interesting. It indicated that the community becomes more dysbiotic and more virulent under those environmental conditions.
Obviously they are speaking of disturbances in the ecosystem initiated by a pathogen.
Which is kind of what we are talking about with FMT. I do not know the details, but I understand that for FMT they use some medical intervention or other to stop inflammation in the gut, wash it out then apply the sample of a healthy microbiome.
Not asserting, just hypothesising, but would this not mean from the microbes points of view they were going from a healthy gut to a seemingly healthy gut. So they would be less likely, I once again hypothesise, to start producing those virulence factors or putative virulence factors mentioned by Frias-Lopez.
I was kind assuming that the pill would be assumedly commensal or beneficial bacteria dropped into a diseased gut. That it would be just like the probiotics I have taken. And that if we did not fully understand them, which seems to be the case with stuff on the market now, and the assumption that they were certainly commensal or beneficial proved to be wrong etc etc etc.
I do not mean to be all doom and gloom. One could presumably do the science and do it properly and all would be great. It is just that that article made an impression on me, and I have being thinking of some of the risks I took without knowing them to be risks when I listened to doctors and microbiologists and biochemists who were very certain that they knew what they were doing.
I don't mean to be doom and gloom but maybe I'm having one of those days. Perhaps all these points are irrelevant and I should say I cannot wait till the research is done, and someone has written a book or an article about it that is accessible and not too simplified or too wrong. That too is an assumption, of course, and one I assume I would like to put to the test.
