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Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

This article asserts that the gut-brain axis model theory is more than just a theory. But AFAIK, this has yet to be demonstrated medically, via FDA-approved therapies that treat the brain by changing the gut. Thus the idea is intriguing, but IMHO, unproven where it counts, in treating and curing sickness.

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I'll challenge that, to me this is a no-brainer with mountains of evidence.

You can look at research about using antibiotics or fecal-matter transplants and outcomes on both physiological and psychological health.

Too many to list for antibiotics and host health:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C10&q=ant...

Here's one about treating metabolic syndrome with fecal-matter transplants to cause a shift in host microbiome

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5045147/

  "The human gut microbiome is recognized as an independent environmental modulator of host metabolic health and disease. Research in animal models has demonstrated that the gut microbiome has the functional capacity to induce or relieve metabolic syndrome."

How is that different from saying that there's an arm-brain axis, because breaking your arm causes psychological effects, and treating the fracture alleviates these effects?

The question is if you can treat the brain by doing something to a healthy arm, or vice versa.

It cites multiple studies though. E.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4367209/

Just because there are not currently any FDA approved medicines doesn’t mean it isn’t science. I also would push back at anyone asserting government approval is required for science to be accurate.

100%. FDA approval is nonsense. FDA plays in arms of big pharma to provide you good advice which also makes money. They hardly peddle any advice which doesn't make money. For instance, linkage of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease etc with processed foods, sugar, fructose (fruit juice, corn syrup) etc despite tonnes of contrary evidence

Nah bro, this is just like all rare cancers and orphan diseases, which are also fake. If they were real, the FDA would be on top of that.

Get a load of this literature review on the gut brain axis from pages 88-137, 49 pages listing over 1694 totally bogus citations: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/physrev.0001.... There's clearly no epistemological basis for this stuff!

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I believe the opposite is actually applied in practice, e.g. prescribing antidepressants to people with IBS for instance where the physical cause of the bowel symptoms isn't obvious/is suspected to be neurologically related.

From the point of view of somebody with IBD, negative cognitive effects in the middle of a flare seem pretty "common sense" obvious but it could also be down to dehydration etc... But that's in the case where there is a specific physical gut disease process in progress. I imagine that treating mental health conditions by altering the gut in people who have healthy bowels is probably a dead end.

It's good to be skeptical, but my wife works in this field and I can tell you that there's a lot capital flowing to this area of research, and a substantive body of research that supports it.

I certainly hope it's more than a hypothesis! [1]

If true, this could potentially provide breakthroughs against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism, and a whole host of other diseases.

[1] I know hope isn't science. But let's give the investigators plenty of money to continue this research. This is the most promising new line of thinking we've had towards solving these diseases in my entire lifetime. beta amyloid, tau, and the rest haven't gotten us anywhere.

We also know that science doesn't do a very good job when it comes to long term effects on human beings. They took awfully long time to declare that smoking is bad, despite plenty of evidence. Same goes for alcohol. They have still not figured out fat, carbs, sugar etc.

I feel, science when it comes to directly observable and measurable systems works pretty well and is accurate. However, when same is applied to systems which are not lab controlled/controllable (like human diet) then it really hard to prove of disprove anything. We are better off believing things which are proven in practice than believe bigpharma funded studies which can be (and are) manipulated by fudging, manufacturing and/or simply twisting data.

Science is a method/study, not an isolated entity. Who is "they"? You mean "scientists"? Which ones? The ones paid off by Big Tobacco? Often the negative issues we face are ignored due to conflicts of interest, bias, and societies/economies valuing certain things (wealth of few) over other things (health of many). That is not the fault of "science".

I'd cut scientists some slack here. People often forget that almost all of the actually useful and used medicine is less than 100 years old; that almost all that goes into items of everyday life is less than 100 years old too. Cigarettes in the form we recognize today are less than 200 years old, and for most of the time since then 'till now, neither medicine nor biological sciences knew shit about anything, or had any useful equipment to measure anything.

The exponential progress of technology isn't just the Internet and rockets and GDP. It's all knowledge and all tools derived from it, many of which are necessary to make further scientific advances. Arguably, all that's useful has been invented or refined in the last 200 years, with the distribution leaning heavily towards the present.

So yeah, it took scientists a while to declare that smoking is bad. There were many reasons for it, but a major contributing factor was that they had neither good models nor good tools until very recently.

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