And the prevailing wisdom is disturbing in that it actually knows so little about what's shaping up to become the greatest scientific revolution since the discovery of—what else?—penicillin.
So everything at the moment is either "unknown" or "tentative" or, my personal worst, "maybe yes, maybe no," which are Weasel Words In Extremis.
But look at the entire field and you immediately get suspicious. Cancer, autism, obesity, asthma, all of these so-called "modern" diseases—well, they didn't just spring from nowhere.
I'm firmly from the camp that doesn't believe you "catch a chill" because you didn't wear a scarf in the rain. Nor that your arthritis is acting up because "the barometer is low."
Nope; there is a whole lot going on behind the scenes that we plainly just have no idea about, and as far as my logical mind can see, the most promising clues lie within this mysterious universe called, for lack of a more determinitive name, "the microbiome."
You know we're just bags of chemicals, right? Well, microbes aren't chemicals, but they rely on chemicals to communicate—and don't mistake me, microbes communicate.
Microbes communicate, but I also believe that plants communicate, fungi communicate, hell, for all I know, oceans communicate.
Perhaps not in ways we understand, but chemicals are mighty powerful ways to send messages—really, complex, extremely information-dense messages.
In one case that I remember reading about—and I'm not interested in anecdotal evidence, only documented facts—a large network of trees (yes, trees) apparently somehow agreed with each other to put out a toxin in their leaves to counter being eaten by a certain grazing herbivore in an African reserve.
The owner of the reserve, a most practical man and not prone to flights of fancy, discovered by trial and error that the trees were somehow communicating through underground networks of root systems to fill their leaves with a toxin that killed the particular invasive species of kudu that had been voraciously feeding on them (and thereby killing the trees.)
Did you know that killer whales, dolphins and elephants have odd parts of their brain that humans don't have and that we can't explain the functions of?
Well, did you know that honeybees like certain flowers that to us appear just plain old yellow, but to them appear lit up like signs saying "free honey!" because bees can see in ultraviolet?
Doesn't that make you begin to question how much else is going on in this world that we can't "see," "hear," "feel" or "taste?"
I digress, but it's my point that those trillions of pals there in our guts aren't just there for window dressing. And they aren't dumb, brainless bugs, either. For one thing, they've been around a lot longer—like, three billion years longer—than 99% of all other life on this planet, so they've had quite the run of the chicken coop during all that time.
And in all the five or so mass extinctions that we know of, in which sometimes 99% of all living things perished, well, those microbes were the ones who survived.
There is evidence that they can survive in space; there's proof that they thrive in boiling water that's made of 100% hydrogen sulphide, and since they outnumer all other living things in biomass by about the power of ten, well, it's no stretch to agree that it's they who are our overlords and not us who are theirs.
This "experiment" that I'm conducting is not frivolous. I'm not doing this just for a lark or to lose weight or to grow more hair.
I want to see if, at any level, I can actually change my physical condition in positive ways with a controlled, documented and hopefully replicable experiment that I am free to conduct on myself in the hopes that I will be able to advise others who are possibly going through a hard time with the medical side of life, again, not with old wives' nostrums such as Wear a coat, you'll catch cold, but more like Wear a seatbelt, you might live if you crash.
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