blistovmhz

Aside from issues confined directly to the GI, did you suffer any other broader, systemic symptoms? If so, I'd be very interested to hear about specific issues that you believed to be ultimately caused by gut dysbiosis, as well as which issues the FMT ultimately seemed to resolve.

Prior to the FMT, what is your history with antibiotics? Had you taken broad spectrum, oral antibiotics prior or during the gut issues, or was transplant day the first? Any thoughts on whether or not the ABX may have provided the "cure" and the FMT was simply incidental?

Did you smoke (tobacco) prior, during, or post FMT? If so, any correlations to note? Any correlation between alcohol consumption and symptoms? Can you think of any exposure to some pathogen (bacterial/fungal/viral) which may have triggered the gut issues?

Prior to the FMT, did you ever have periods of remission or at least days where you'd poop like a normal person? Did you ever find that the frequency of bowel movements was in any way associated with the bipolar/PND or overall cognitive function or physical stamina?

Right. Same goes for people changing their own tire, doing their own home renovations, or cooking for themselves. Leave that shit to the professionals. ;)

Here's the problem with blind faith in the scientific/medical establishment. Proper controls and safety measures are absolutely a wonderful thing, but the system very often breaks down. A good example: With regards to proper thyroid levels, if you ask any practicing physician what the correct/healthy TSH level is, they'll either not know and have to refer to the last labs they ordered, or they'll state 0.5 - 5.0. The problem with this is that while that is the generally accepted value by physicians, it is NOT accepted by the medical research community. No study in the history of man kind has ever found that value to be correct/optimal. Those numbers were pulled out of someone's ass at a time before we had the ability to measure T3/T4 (the actual thyroid hormones that TSH is supposed to be monitoring and signalling). Since the 1950's, there have been at least a few hundred well designed studies to determine the correct/optimal TSH range, and every one of them has found that range to be between 0.3 - 3.0, and many have also suggested that a TSH of 4-5 in some people, is not only not optimal, but may in fact be dangerous. You may also recall that all the way through the 80's and 90's, medical professionals were telling everyone to stop eating butter and switch to margarine, or that in the early 1900's, heroine was prescribed for "womens mania". The problem is primarily one of ego. Medical doctors, and unfortunately most scientists, have this notion that everything they know is accurate and they will completely dismiss any suggestion or even hard evidence to the contrary. They paid a few hundred grand to learn what they "know", so to them, whatever was in their texts is written in stone.

Ultimately this results in a lot of very important research being either not done, or completely ignored. On the subject of FMT's, it's only in the last 10 or 15 years that we've really started to develop a basic understanding of the interplay between the gut and the brain. 99% of practicing physicians do not believe there is any. Hell, my 5 GI specialists don't believe in gut dysbiosis, despite MOUNTAINS of good data as evidence.

Just because the authority is not doing something, or does not believe in something, does not mean it is not possible or doesn't exist. Every scientific discovery has ended decades of "actual scientists" being dead wrong.

I live my entire life through the scientific method, but nothing in that method says I have to listen to anyone else if they're not providing evidence of their claims. It says precisely the opposite in fact. Hundreds of thousands of people (probably millions) have moderate to severe gut problems and thus far, the only response from the "medical community" is that you have IBS. Ask what IBS is, what causes it, or what distinguishes it from a plethora of other diseases, and you'll probably be asked to find a new family doctor. That's a horrendously big fuck up IMO, especially when the cause is often something very simple, and the cure is already available. FMT's have not received the attention they deserve yet, considering the absurd success rate of FMT in the resolution of a wide range of issues, from digestive to neurological. Almost every study on the subject is currently focused specifically on C.Difficile (which is an important problem to solve, but in terms of having the widest impact, it would make more sense to shift focus to IBS-D/UC).