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Comment by medymed | Hacker News Reader

So many gut microbiome variables, so many neurologic variables in the brain, so many type 1 errors calling out from the data in seductive whispers "publish me...". While preliminary research is curious, I predict that more medium-term progress will be a result of throwing fecal transplant at many disorders, it will work for a few (like abx-resistant C diff), and it will not work for others even though people will claim it does. and then people will make up biologic stories about how things interact with decreasingly hand wavy (inflammation!) theories that may or may not be practically testable depending on the number of working parts involved. That's how medicine works a lot of the time, anyways.

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There's not a single biological system in our bodies that isn't incredibly complex and has many moving parts. How do you recommend researcher investigate these interactions without being able to control for all these factors?

This is absolutely true, which is why virtually any study around Autism is complicated.

It's virtually impossible to prove or disprove anything from causes to treatments simply because collecting control groups on such a wide spectrum is nearly impossible on it's own.

Great question. I think this is why organ systems with (arguably) relatively fewer interconnecting parts and more accessible parts than the brain, for example blood, are easier to research. Not all of the parts will be able to be controlled, and the closest approximations are probably animal models with a few cloned or inducible genetic changes where significant results are not easily generalizable to people. Biology will probably not be like physics or chemistry, where underlying principles are often generalizable to matter under specified conditions, because we can't defineand control the initial context within and around a human, and ethical guidelines ensure that studies are limited to a morally acceptable degree. So we often have to see what works/fails in practice and explain it in terms of what we know, try to fill in the gaps with more research, and see where it takes us in terms of new treatment possibilities. It's a very iterative ordeal.

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