Idiocracy, Part 1. Scientists in education only.

 

I started off severely trying to word this as inoffensively as possible. I was failing to do so and wanted to apologize to readers. However, more recently my attitude has changed dramatically, and I don't care at all about offending people. I am growing more and more alarmed by the day at what I observe and experience. And being amiable, scientific, objective, etc., has seemed to be almost entirely ineffective. I observe that the vast majority of people are morons and anything other than a punch in the face just drifts past them like it never existed. Unfortunately, telling people they're stupid doesn't make them smart. I only see one solution - to fix people. Yet my efforts to do that are also severely hampered by the poorly functioning majority.

 

 

There was an event I attended where some of the most notable doctors and researchers in a field gave presentations. I was going to make a public post thanking the number of knowledgeable and competent researchers, since I so often criticize the ones that aren't. But then I emailed one of them and was stunned by their unscientific, incurious mentality.

 

I see various people, including other degree holders, saying things like "I may not know much but those other guys know what they're doing". Then I go talk to those other guys, and they absofuckinglutely do not know what the fuck they're doing. The people that everyone is depending on/assuming to be competent and knowledgeable are not.

 

It's both incredibly frustrating and horrifying/disturbing to find out that these types of people are at the top and everyone else has complete faith in them. They hide behind a veil of secrecy and silence, and that's how they preserve their presumed image of being highly knowledgeable, intelligent, and competent. They are good at only showing to the public a limited amount of themselves, enough only to project and infer expertise and confidence, but not so much as to actually let people get a good idea of their true selves.

 

The more exposure I get to them, the more I alarmingly discover how much they are scientists in name and education only. "Scientists" lacking scientific mindsets driven by curiosity, forming & testing novel hypotheses, constantly seeking out new data to add to their current repertoire, and update their current understandings and positions accordingly. "Scientists" lacking intuition and problem-solving abilities.

 

Many are like horses with blinds on - they see only what's directly in front of them, only able to perform a narrow range of tasks they have been trained to do, and are entirely unable and/or unwilling to review or test anything else. Rigid minds lacking plasticity that is vital for learning, discovery, and intelligence. Only able/willing to mentally process specific types of information presented in specific ways. Anything outside of that they ignore and mischaracterize. They continue to insist "we don't know" while ignoring a plethora of evidence that would enable them to know.

 

A large part seems to stem from arrogance and pride. Their actions and attitudes end up being incredibly unscientific because in science wilful ignorance, and picking & choosing what one wants to believe/consider/review, are anathema to the principle of shifting our views based on all currently available evidence [reference].

 

I've had some prestigious doctors and researchers say some incredibly unscientific things to me. I've experienced many being corrupt, abusive, and anti-scientific. So many "experts" being ignorant and incompetent about their own field that I now think it's only a tiny minority who are knowledgeable and competent about their own field.

 

I've had jaw-dropping, dumbfounding experiences with doctors in person, to where I was sitting there staring at them mouth agape, wondering if this was one of the people I've seen covered in the news with fake degrees. Yet they were at a major hospital in the US with my life in their hands. And I was incredibly lucky to have survived.

 

I listed a number of the more major examples here: https://archive.ph/Nyvse#selection-989.0-989.1, but I will list more at the end of this.

 

There's one scientist who has dedicated much of her time to rooting out the fraud, incompetence, and corruption in science. While she has much support from many, she also gets a significant amount of hate and attacks from others. On one of her blogs there was a comment by one of the latter types. It was a dumbfounding comment defending the fraudulent and incompetent scientists, but had a sliver of valuable and important insight. They said "most scientists are just people doing their jobs and wanting to go home to their families at the end of the day". They're not idealists, nor carry the mentality of being a scientist, they're just people trying to make a living. In my experience, a large percentage of the general population do not care about their jobs, nor are they good at them. They're simply trying to make a living. And apparently this extends into the science and medical world as well. It's not a particularly surprising revelation, but it's one I think most laypeople don't consider/realize, and it's important for them to.

 

The PubPeer project was created to provide an avenue to address the fraud, incompetence, etc. in published science. Its design and function is incredibly important as a public service. Yet from my experience it is run as problematically as the entities it is designed to expose/regulate. Biased, subjective, unaccountable censorship in total disregard of their rules/guidelines. The people running it are guilty of all the same behavior they criticize the journals for.

 

I'm not really sure where this idea comes from that people with university degrees are all highly intelligent, but it seems very pervasive. Knowledge and education != intelligence. To gain the former all you need is a decent memory, while the latter requires more and different brain functions.

 

Thinking back to my high school days, looking around at my peers, how many of them did I consider competent and intelligent? How many would I trust to make decisions that would impact myself and others? 1-2 out of 30 would be very generous. I've seen medical students say they felt that less than 50% of their peers were competent.

 

When scouting universities for people healthy enough to be FMT (Fecal Microbiota Transplant) donors it seemed that upwards of 95% were very visibly unhealthy. For more on the connection between physical health and brain function see https://archive.ph/i1YOs#selection-643.11-647.1.

 

The number of people I come across on a daily basis with severe learning disabilities (vastly worse than my own) is extremely concerning. The most common thing they do is spread harmful misinformation about a wide variety of subjects, while demonstrating the inability to absorb and analyze new information and adjust their understandings & positions based on it.

 

The sciences do attract intelligent people. But then there seems to be a larger percentage of other people who get into it for some other reason(s). Maybe people who have the attitude of "I guess I'll do that", "seems enjoyable enough and easy enough for the pay", people who think the position is prestigious and want others to respec muh authoritah?

 

There seems to be ever-growing support for my analysis that poorly functioning people are running society, and the result is a dystopia.

 

 

Additional examples:

 

I've got a big ass chip on my shoulder, for numerous reasons. One is that there are so many people regularly getting things extremely wrong, and those people have a direct detrimental impact on my life. Another is how many times I neutrally state simple facts (with citations) and get hostile, belligerent, willfully ignorant responses. Another is how often I've corrected widespread misinformation, erroneous beliefs, harmful medical practices, wrong and harmful research activities, etc., and just get ignored. 

 

Throughout the past decade that I've been participating in these microbiome and FMT activities, I've been regularly subjected to attacks from degree holders who are so incredibly wrong, and yet so arrogantly and confidently so. It has been an incredibly annoying and frustrating experience. I will list some examples below. I started saving these examples because of how frequently they occurred relative to the general public trust that laypeople still have in these individuals and their institutions. Personally, I've lost virtually all trust in anyone. I think the amount of competent, intelligent people is significantly less than 1% of the population. An incredibly alarming realization.

 

I've become appalled by the academic institutions, and the individuals that make them up. There used to be consequences for being wrong. Nature would purge you. But we've unilaterally overridden nature without any consideration of the consequences or intelligent replacements of the important functions that nature naturally provides. The result of that is the human species mindlessly destroying our planet and ourselves. I'm not in favor of natural selection or survival of the fittest. I think that's brutal, cruel, and uncivilized. I am however strongly in favor of implementing intelligent and ethical alternatives https://maximiliankohler.medium.com/eugenics-past-present-and-future-74d0ea5998b4.

 

When I reported the alarming results from the first 6000 FMT donor applicants I screened, someone rightfully criticized various issues with my wording https://archive.ph/wikgF. What they were missing was the decade of history and context behind it. So I'll provide some of that here, and in Part 2.

 

The user in that example who arrogantly and overconfidently attacked me and denigrated my "scientific attractiveness analysis" as "nothing more than phrenology without a shred of evidence" is a perfect example of the kind of regular attacks I've received over the years. Following are many more.

 

---

 

This started at least as far back as 2016 in /r/Microbiome:

 

Researcher being wrong while accusing me of peddling pseudoscientific nonsense regarding FMT, gut microbiome, and top young athletes as FMT donors (Nov 2016): https://web.archive.org/web/20210617144307/https://old.reddit.com/r/Microbiome/comments/5cpy13/antibiotics_during_birth_effect_and_what_to_do/da1q65m/ - continued: https://web.archive.org/web/20210617145217/https://old.reddit.com/r/Microbiome/comments/5cpy13/antibiotics_during_birth_effect_and_what_to_do/da1w3vt/

 

/u/testingtestingIBS - researcher that doesn't read the research. In response to my accusation of "I don't think you've been following the research very closely with a comment like that" he replies: "I go to conferences and am asked to contribute on papers. I work at a University. I also just ask my colleages in the building next to mine. They are the ones who publish the research." (Aug 2016) https://archive.ph/Ecrd3#selection-2645.41-2645.42. [Archived version of the study collection reference].

 

"You understanding that the immune system is regulated by the gut is a pop culture myth" (May 2017) https://archive.ph/Pd3q5

 

"The microbiome is not the crux of the entire body and any microbiome researcher worth his salt will tell you that" (Sep 2017). https://archive.fo/MHdAa

 

This type of regular occurrence was one of the reasons I started up my wiki https://humanmicrobiome.info. First in /r/Microbiome, then moved it to /r/HumanMicrobiome, then to GitHub.

 

I was criticizing bad FMT studies at least as far back as 2017: https://archive.ph/x3buq

 

The /r/Microbiome issue spiraled out of control, and one or more university researchers started behaving extremely childishly, trolling, harmfully spreading misinformation, and more/worse till the admins stepped in and banned a dozen accounts and I created /r/HumanMicrobiome where I enforced strict evidence-based rules: https://archive.ph/WAuck. It also came at a time where my health was extremely poor. I was bedridden and struggling to stay alive and find an FMT donor.

 

"PhD|MBA|Cancer|Biogerontology" says "0% chance FMT by itself is disease modifying for AD (Alzheimer’s Disease) patients." (Mar 2019) https://archive.fo/WCOFe

 

Scientist in the biological sciences. Argument about donor quality in /r/CrohnsDisease (2019) https://archive.fo/NwbsR#selection-3951.11-3951.12

 

A frighteningly ignorant and unscientific researcher (2020) https://archive.vn/Kiqvo#selection-3149.11-3153.0

 

"Your 'dysbiosis causes everything' cult" in response to "both IBS and depression & anxiety stem from gut dysbiosis" (Jan 2021) https://web.archive.org/web/20210116015712/https://old.reddit.com/r/IBSResearch/comments/kxto32/the_level_and_prevalence_of_depression_and/ - https://archive.vn/rT1dw#selection-1991.11-1995.0. And the behavior continued into Oct 2022 [1][2][3].

 

 

Hundreds of FMT researchers all over the world were getting FMT so incredibly wrong for at least a decade. This resulted in me not being able to access an obvious treatment/cure for my conditions which had left me on disability for 10+ years. Starting in 2018 I wrote to hundreds of them https://archive.ph/NZtvl with evidence and arguments regarding what I saw to be the most major deficiency in all of their studies - donor quality. Yet even after I handed them the likely answers on a silver platter it was largely ignored and they continued to fail, over and over and over. It's one thing to fail on your own. It's exponentially more incompetent to continue to fail even after you've been provided the answers.

 

[Begin list of continued FMT failures & incompetence]

 

2021 study for IBS, seemingly still using the same inadequate donors as their previous failed trials, and the mod of the sub (who seems to be in IBS academia) arguing that donor quality is not the most blatant deficiency. Also includes my email to an FMT researcher who declines to focus on donor quality: https://archive.ph/JIVhI

 

2021 study for cachexia using obese donors: https://archive.ph/rcsng

 

2020 study for obesity by the same people that wrote the "super-donors" review: https://archive.vn/ni5vs - Got more info from a docuseries in 2021 and we see even more how juvenile of an attempt it was: https://archive.ph/Jt9fR. I think it's fairly likely that the noise I had been making about donor quality was part of what lead them to write their "super-donor" review, and then do this FMT clinical trial to test a "super-donor". Yet they seemed to have learned nothing from my writing, and did not consult me, and thus got it extremely wrong. 

 

2020 study for melanoma patients using stool from other melanoma patients: https://archive.vn/ouejM

 

2020 study for obesity. Missing vital donor quality info: https://archive.vn/wd4gC

 

2020 study using c-section mothers as donors for their infants: https://archive.vn/OHfoK

 

2020 study for metabolic syndrome using old, formerly-obese patients as donors: https://archive.vn/Nuk7k

 

2020 study for UC, deficient donor criteria: https://archive.vn/zLuHA

 

2020 study for Alcohol Use Disorder. Openbiome donors, only 1 enema FMT: https://archive.vn/zsLDe

 

2020 study for IBS. Inadequate donor criteria: https://archive.vn/Vtk4E

 

2020 study for IBS. Inadequate donor criteria, treatment length, etc.: https://archive.vn/svu52

 

2020 study for obesity. Inadequate donor criteria, misleading/ignorant statements from the authors: https://archive.vn/etVBW

 

2019 study in healthy volunteers. Erroneously gave one of them antibiotics after a mild/common reaction: https://archive.vn/L0P4D

 

2019 study for IBS using Openbiome's donors: https://archive.vn/PF09E

 

2019 Openbiome AMA, still stuck in the mindset that donor doesn't matter: https://archive.vn/wGG3Q

 

2019 study for IBS. Deficient donor critiera: https://archive.vn/KLrWh

 

2019 study for obesity using Openbiome's donors: https://archive.vn/XpQ6u

 

2018 autologous FMT for cancer patients: https://archive.vn/Q6qN6

 

[End of FMT failures & incompetence list]

 

Assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School and director of the UCLA Microbiome Core, makes strange and incorrect statements about FMT and the gut microbiome. Published on NBCnews.com. See comments: https://archive.ph/yhjfc.

50 researchers and many news organizations spread harmful misinformation about the gut microbiome (Nov 2021): https://archive.ph/oUuHT#selection-2807.13-2807.14

I had a brief discussion with a professor specializing in IBS. I shared a wide variety of information on FMT & the gut microbiome with him, including a recent result where I got major improvements for IBS, a bunch of other information stressing donor quality [1][2][3], and referencing IBS FMT studies with high success rates. He responded with "that you've tried 11 FMTs should indicate this is not a viable approach". An incredibly close-minded, willfully ignorant, unintelligent, and erroneous statement/conclusion. And I've found this to be extremely common amongst "professionals".

No FMT for COVID-19 or a myriad of other conditions: 

• Intestinal Flora as a Potential Strategy to Fight SARS-CoV-2 Infection (review, Jun 2020) https://web.archive.org/web/20230616061833/https://old.reddit.com/r/HumanMicrobiome/comments/hhjtk3/intestinal_flora_as_a_potential_strategy_to_fight/ 
• Gut reaction: How the gut microbiome may influence the severity of COVID-19 (Jun 2020) https://web.archive.org/web/20230616014312/https://old.reddit.com/r/HumanMicrobiome/comments/hefe17/gut_reaction_how_the_gut_microbiome_may_influence/ 
• Gut microbiota composition reflects disease severity and dysfunctional immune responses in patients with COVID-19 (Jan 2021, n=100) https://web.archive.org/web/20220821082834/https://old.reddit.com/r/HumanMicrobiome/comments/kwhm0h/gut_microbiota_composition_reflects_disease/ 
• Fecal microbiota transplantation for COVID-19; a potential emerging treatment strategy (Dec 2020) https://web.archive.org/web/20210126100505/https://old.reddit.com/r/HumanMicrobiome/comments/l3m440/fecal_microbiota_transplantation_for_covid19_a/
• Gut Microbiota in Covid-19: An unrecognised player? (Nov 2020) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2020.576551/full
• The gut microbiome: an under-recognised contributor to the COVID-19 pandemic? (Nov 2020) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1756284820974914
• Gut Microbes Could Predict How Seriously Ill a COVID-19 Patient Might Get, Preliminary Study Suggests. (Apr 2020, n=1657, preprint) https://www.newsweek.com/gut-microbes-could-predict-how-seriously-ill-covid-19-patient-might-get-preliminary-study-suggests-1500568 Gut microbiota may underlie the predisposition of healthy individuals to COVID-19. 
• "Two patients had COVID-19-related pneumonia, and FMT cured both from CDI and COVID-19" (Sep 2020) https://www.dldjournalonline.com/article/S1590-8658(20)30474-6/fulltext
•  Poop Transplants Have Been Linked to Improved COVID-19 in Two Patients in Poland (Jul 2021) https://www.sciencealert.com/two-people-in-poland-had-poo-transplants-and-somehow-their-covid-symptoms-got-better Rapid resolution of COVID-19 after faecal microbiota transplantation.

Twitter thread where two degree holders are presented with all these citations and still argue against it. Seemingly looking at an apple and claiming it's an orange: https://archive.ph/JPxUf - https://archive.ph/leSvA

 

 

Insane misallocation of resources for COVID-19: https://archive.ph/ZzWAh#selection-2043.10-2043.11

 
UCSD fails to run clinical trial for possible panacea despite one of their most well-known researchers writing a paper on the importance of it, and being in an excellent position to do so: https://archive.ph/C1Zvr - https://archive.md/umVbx#selection-537.23-537.24 

 

CFS researchers misallocating resources & focus on diagnostics & mechanisms instead of a likely currently-existing treatment/cure: https://archive.vn/sGCoS#selection-1649.10-1653.1 - https://archive.vn/y2zi2#selection-2785.12-2789.0

Many doctors and official FMT sources were using aged/old donors despite there being significant evidence and rationale against doing so https://humanmicrobiome.info/fmt-questionnaire/, and only stopped when they saw detrimental outcomes. Which also shows poor intuition.

 

10+ years after Dr Martin Blaser published warnings about the collateral damage from antibiotics in the prestigious journal of Nature, and years after large amounts of evidence was published demonstrating the harms, it is still largely ignored and the focus remains almost solely on resistance (see comments).

Plus, researchers then went to the Hadza -- pretty much the last place/group of people where we haven't extinguished our host-native microbiomes that have been evolving alongside us for millions of years -- and what did they do? They gave them antibiotics. Stupid people are extremely dangerous.

 

Degree holders on /r/askscience, /r/publichealth, /r/psychology, /r/COVID19, /r/ID_News behaving extremely corruptly, abusively, and anti-scientifically: https://archive.ph/O0OiN#selection-11109.11-11113.1. Reddit is a window into the status of society. Reddit is incredibly dysfunctional because individuals are incredibly dysfunctional.

 

The/one of the main/top SIBO/IBS researchers being very wrong, and thus significantly delaying a viable treatment: https://archive.ph/lOftP#selection-2111.55-2111.56. They were one of the hundreds of researchers/research centers I wrote to. I offered them a chance to redeem themselves (I didn't use that wording) by running an FMT clinical trial with a high-quality donor, and they decided against it.

 

Ron Davis, director of Stanford’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research Center searches for answer to his son’s devastating condition (2017): https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/12/stanford-scientist-searches-for-answer-to-his-sons-devastating-condition/ - I contacted him in 2019 about FMT. Due to his poor judgment to not recognize and pursue FMT as a currently available treatment, he not only prolonged his own kid's extreme suffering for many years, but thousands of others with CFS.

 

Ken Lassesen of cfsremission.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20210525225811/https://old.reddit.com/r/HumanMicrobiome/comments/nkstr1/critical_response_to_ken_lassesens_may_2021_post/ - From our previous interactions he already knew where to find the correct information which he could have compared his own findings & knowledge to. But decided not to, and thus got it so incredibly wrong.

I could give tons of links on CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], and how the medical system has been treating it similar to female hysteria. Even in 2022 it appears that the majority of doctors are still moronically ignorant about it [1][2]. 

 

 

Subjected healthy people to broad-spectrum antibiotics (2018) https://archive.ph/WFg2A

 

More antibiotics to healthy people, plus erroneously concluding the antibiotic is both safe and beneficial: https://archive.ph/37qkn

 

Erroneous and misleading statements about FMT: https://archive.ph/5T1hp

 

FMT researcher doesn't think it's important to try to find a high-quality donor till later on https://archive.vn/xQP47 - which makes no sense because if you have a low-quality, ineffective donor your initial study is useless has drastically lowered value. https://archive.vn/ddi7S

 

FMT clinics largely run by incompetent people, and/or parasitic ones with the goal of sucking as much money as possible from sick people. https://humanmicrobiome.info/fmt/#fmt-clinics

 
A stool supplier for FMT gets caught blatantly lying about their donor's medical conditions, plus being racist, and none of the dozens of professionals working in the field who follow the related groups speak up about it.

Cryobiologist ignorant about their own field: https://archive.vn/B7O0f#selection-1905.10-1905.11 - professor of neuroscience and more: https://archive.vn/ioKDl

 

When “experts” misrepresent the science. 8 False Claims 60 Minutes (Dr. Patricia Hibberd) Made About Probiotics https://drruscio.com/8-false-claims-about-probiotics - then other degree holders cite their credentials instead of scientific literature, while saying Dr Ruscio is wrong despite him citing all of his claims: https://archive.vn/RBzkJ

 

User says they have science training/education, then maliciously misrepresents citations, refuses to review citations they don't like the implications of, then lies about the contents of the citations. https://archive.vn/MGZlC - https://archive.vn/ZvEyi

 

Study on attractiveness of women with endometriosis retracted due to a bunch of ignorant, unscientific hysteria. This is a perfect example: https://archive.vn/NWrNa. The pubpeer page had numerous quotes from actual intelligent scientists defending the study. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/09/14/womens-respect-is-a-priority-for-us-journal-finally-retracts-paper-claiming-women-with-endometriosis-are-more-attractive/ ‘Women’s respect is a priority for us’: Journal finally retracts paper claiming women with endometriosis are more attractive.

 

/r/starcraft experts arguing ergonomics are not important for pain and injury:

Post from 2018: https://archive.vn/bCsh9 – related thread https://archive.vn/0Wosp where I had an encounter with andy611 https://archive.vn/DjlfN

Repost, a different expert (TheEroSennin) demonstrates their ignorance and incompetence: https://archive.vn/QY0Xb - including in another thread: https://archive.vn/6c8uR

 

Group of microbiology researchers talking about antibiotic resistance, while at the same time researching/advocating/pushing a broad spectrum antibiotic as a solution: https://archive.vn/073zF - https://archive.vn/BbZ5X

 

"BA | Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology" makes ridiculous comment on mask study: https://archive.vn/aGlKm#selection-1989.41-1989.42

 

A group of virologists think and act like they know better than a group of top epidemiologists, and egoistically, and overconfidently spread misinformation about COVID-19 and the Great Barrington Declaration: https://archive.vn/4GRv4#selection-2405.684-2405.685 

 

Pompous, egotistical degree holder citing their degree and experience in an unscientific manner: https://archive.vn/tzUre#selection-2383.10-2387.0 - continued, incorrigible: https://archive.vn/t80Yq

 

PhD holder citing their degree/education in an unrelated field as reason to not have to address the evidence because they're right since they have a PhD: https://archive.vn/8TsUz

 

/u/KetosisMD "I don't need more proof", my anecdotes outweigh the published literature https://archive.vn/V9nr9#selection-795.22-795.23

 

"I have a medical degree and did a simple google search so I don't have to cite sources" https://archive.ph/FS7vH#selection-1535.10-1539.0

 

Perfect example of "education != intelligence" (/r/biology): https://archive.ph/o17Qi#selection-5149.10-5149.11 - https://archive.ph/83txS#selection-2939.12-2939.13

 

Geneticist calling the microbiome a fad in 2021: https://archive.ph/0G3ja#selection-3043.9-3043.10

 

Massive gene editing project for Alzheimer's: https://archive.ph/0G3ja#selection-2395.9-2395.10

 

Public health director opting for irrational, emotional hysteria rather than data/science: https://archive.ph/p3p7g#selection-1853.0-1857.0

 

Public health professor agreeing with an extremely erroneous comment about COVID: https://archive.ph/9ZwYV#selection-1565.9-1569.0

 
/u/Nerva2940 - ER nurse handing out extremely erroneous diagnoses based on almost no information, while being willfully ignorant: https://archive.ph/Qntcd#selection-2689.0-2689.1 - https://archive.ph/51omC#selection-6871.8-6871.9

The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades. "The most influential researchers have long believed so dogmatically in one theory of Alzheimer’s that they systematically thwarted alternative approaches. Several scientists described those who controlled the Alzheimer’s agenda as 'a cabal'."

I recall the Boeing 737 Max coverage, where a whistleblower commented on the widespread incompetence, being a point for me where I realized "wow, it's everyone" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/business/boeing-737-max-whistleblower.html

I started this off with scientists in mind, but really this encompasses all professions. Including what I've observed and experienced of the justice system, which is horrific. And every professional contributing to, and not stopping the massive amount of pollution that is harming the health and function of us all.

---

One healthcare professional sought out a doctor for advice on FMT. They said this doctor was a top FMT specialist. The advice they got was horrible and nearly cost them their life. And this was someone who was rightfully critical about the majority of professionals in her own field having it wrong. I continue to see more people follow this exact same pattern:

• They are aware that "professionals" are often wrong and ignorant..
• They find one that they put their trust in - "oh this one's different".
• They get terrible advice/info. 
• They trust the advice and get harmed. 

It is very reassuring and relieving to be able to put your full trust in someone, and offload the weight of your worries on them. This mental burden is likely a large part of why these people allow themselves to be convinced when they know better. 

It's also impossible to be an expert yourself in all areas, so our societal structure requires us to be able to trust other "experts". The fact that we cannot is extremely concerning.

A few examples of the result of all this:

 

1. What I've had to do as a patient:

 

It's absolutely insane what I, a patient, have had to do as far as researching everything on my own, essentially becoming a top expert in a science/medical field completely self-taught with no higher education, obtaining a treatment for myself and others, treating myself, creating a website & business to enable all this, etc. https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/my-detailed-experiences-lessons-from-13-different-fmt-donors-jun-2018.53/post-130 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wi52tLjCps. All while extremely disabled - physically and mentally. Then on top of that when I likely figure out myself some of the most important questions in FMT research, when hundreds of other research groups with extensive university resources that I completely lack, continue to fail to figure out, then I spend extensive time and effort trying to share the answers with them, and they apparently have their heads in the sand and continue to fail while behaving arrogantly, it all becomes even more ridiculous.

 

 

2. Catastrophes:

 

How microbiome scientists share responsibility/blame for the climate crisis. https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2020/10/how-microbiome-scientists-share.html

 

While antibiotic resistance gets all the attention, the damage being done to our host-native microbiomes is arguably as big a threat as climate change, as the damage compounds over generations, and once it's gone you can't get it back. https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/while-antibiotic-resistance-gets-all-the-attention-the-damage-being-do.50/

 

 

3. I'll add the absurd response to COVID-19:

 
The insane misallocation of resources for COVID-19: https://archive.ph/ZzWAh#selection-2043.10-2043.11 which resulted in a wide variety of detrimental outcomes: https://archive.ph/vZN23

 

The widespread misinformation, censorship, manipulation, extremely biased coverage, hysteria, tribal mentalities & behavior, unscientific attitudes and approaches, among laypeople, the media, and scientists. Much of it straight out of the books "Manufacturing Consent" and "1984", where the people I generally agree with politically were displaying horrifyingly anti-scientific attitudes (plus irrational, hysterical, etc.) while claiming to indisputably have the science on their side. Doing a 180 and suddenly declaring the authoritarian China as the shining example, while condemning the Nordic countries that behaved much more rationally, non-politically, and scientifically. Academics who should be entirely focused on what the data/evidence shows seemingly developed emotional, anti-scientific attitudes when it came to COVID-19. https://archive.vn/NFKMw#selection-15355.10-15355.11

How is it that there are so many "experts" so delusional that they think shutting down entire states and countries (for almost 2 years...) in order to attempt to extend the lifespans of very old and unhealthy people by a few months is a great idea? Give them palliative care for christ's sake. Old unhealthy people die. If you want to extend their lifespans this is by far the most moronic way you could have chosen to attempt to do that.

COVID-19 is far from the only time I've observed this behavior amongst the research & medical sector though. Other examples are GBS and c-sections.

 

‘Following the science’ is more complicated than we like to admit. Scientists aren’t robots but complicated, messy, biased humans — like the rest of us https://archive.vn/ZBtKX

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Poorly functioning laypeople are absolutely doing vast amounts of harm as well, and I'll cover that next.

Part 2.