Jarred Younger on FMT study

[MonkeyMan]

Recent video from Professor Jarred Younger on a new study on FMT.

I think Jarred is, by leaps and bounds, the best hope we in the patient community have for finding effective treatment.
I'm so glad he is bringing awareness of FMT to the world. And I think this study offers us a lot of hope. My gripe with this study is that it's not clear which aspect of treatment was responsible for the effect. Was it the antibiotics they took before the FMT? Or the FMT itself? Or were both necessary? And what about the duloxetine? Was that necessary?

 

[Byles]

I think Jarred is, by leaps and bounds, the best hope we in the patient community have for finding effective treatment.

I totally agree. He really seems to focus on actual treatments, something which we see way to little of.

I haven't watched this video yet. Will do as I watch them all. I'm caught up with the previous one about the microglia. I didn't know glucorticoids can result in primed microglia and I have been using them daily for years. I'm will post a new thread on it at some point. This info should be common knowledge.

 

[ruben]

I had FMT at a clinic in Stevenage, Hertfordshire around 2015/16. It's quite costly and sadly did nothing for me. I would have thought if it was a "game changer" it would be above the radar by now.

 

[Slushiefan]

I had FMT at a clinic in Stevenage, Hertfordshire around 2015/16. It's quite costly and sadly did nothing for me. I would have thought if it was a "game changer" it would be above the radar by now.

I have tried a lot of experimentation around the biota from various angles as well without any success or even a change (worsening or improvement either way).

Before FMT was a real thing, but it was noted the bacteria in the intestines could have impact, I experimented by attempting to entirely wipe out (sterilize) the bacteria in my digestive system.

Following other protocols that were used to sterilize mice for biota studies, I took a cocktail of multiple different antibiotics (I remember there were 4 types, I recall ciprofloxacin, metronidazole at least), and eating only very small amounts of controlled 'safe' foods for 2 weeks, with fasting entirely for the final 4 days while still taking the antibiotics.

As I exited my protocol I introduced a steady diet of probiotics that were considered to be 'good' eg kefir, yogurt, pickles, etc. along with only turkey meat for a week after that.

I felt no improvement or even a change.

I did have extreme exhaustion for the duration of taking one of the antibiotics. I removed these slowly, one at a time, one every couple of days. I noted that the metronidazole exhausted me in a different way than the CFS does, and that quickly diminished a day after stopping that particular antibiotic.

The results? I lost over 35 pounds, but the CFS fatigue never got worse, never got better, and stayed on unchanged.

Bottom line - I would expect some level of improvement or worsening, even if slight, after or during this experiment, if the bacteria itself were a cause. Instead the only change was a different fatigue that seems to occur every time I take metronidazole.

After that, my personal determination is that the gut biome is a red herring in our disease. Studies have noted that there are many wide ranging bacterial changes during any sickness, but in all the testing done so far, nothing has been shown consistently to introduce improvement due to changing the biome back toward recognized 'safe' biome standards (those that well people have).

I think the bacteria thing is just a downstream effect. I would love to be proven otherwise though!

 

[Slushiefan]

Another antibiotic I took was rifamaxin... I'll probably recall the last one at some point. I remember it was much harder to find (I could only buy it in powder form).

 

[hapl808]

Bottom line - I would expect some level of improvement or worsening, even if slight, after or during this experiment, if the bacteria itself were a cause. Instead the only change was a different fatigue that seems to occur every time I take metronidazole.

Some people have good results, but I agree it raises a real question.

I think the issue is determining whether the gut affects the disease, is affected by the disease, is involved in other mechanisms that affect or are affected by the disease, and so forth.

This is the problem with medicine and why it's so tricky to cure disease. There really aren't that many diseases we can cure. We can't cure MS, cancer, MECFS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, IBS, diabetes, etc. The complexity of our medical establishment sells us on promise, but it's rarely realized.