>>7643662 (pb)
I saw a couple posts in a previous bread regarding microbiome (gut bacteria) and diseases such as cancer and behvioural issues such as autism. So I though I would do some further research on this.
At one time, no thought was given to the role gut bacteria played in health and illness. Antibiotics and similar drugs were prescribed like candy. and today we see them used as a growth promoter in animal husbandry as well as in countless antimicrobial/antibacterial products.
The link between autoimmunity and gut (and microbiome) health is well-known in the natural medicine disciplines. If we go further back in time, say 1700 years ago, we would find documentation of a treatment for diarrhea from a Chinese physician named Ge Hong. This treatment was called yellow soup and used the dried or fermented stool from a healthy person as the major ingredient. This treatment worked as it rebalanced and/or replaced the pathogenic gut bacteria with healthy bacteria. This recipe, administered orally, is possibly one of the first written accounts of what we today call fecal microbiota transplantation.
https://www.research.va.gov/currents/winter2015/winter2015-11.cfm
It is known that an altered gut microbiome is associated with a wide variety of disorders including autoimmune conditions, cancer and behavioural disorders. Further, every organ and tissue has its own microbiome and a disruption in the health of these microbiomes plays an important role in human illness.
For instance, benign and malignant breast tumours have been shown to have different populations of bacteria. Different bacteria present within a tumour also were found to be a possible factor in tumour progression. It was unclear to the researchers however if the differences in the breast microbiome caused the tumour or if they were the result of the disease.
Research has also shown that the bacterial populations that make up the microbiome can influence the effectiveness of cancer treatments. Indeed, some bacteria play a role in supporting the immune system to fight cancer. Some cancer treatments can and do have a significant influence on certain bacteria within the microbiome–in fact, a part of the cancer-fighting mechanisms of these chemotherapeutic drugs may be that they stimulate some of the micro-organisms to promote the formation of immune cells.
https://www.cancerquest.org/cancer-biology/microbiome