The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse

The immune system can get kicked into overdrive when the fungi run riot.

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[Fatesrider]

All sorts of things can change the balance of your gut microbiome. Any kind of general infection, antibiotics, changing your diet, stress, etc.

It's a wild and super important world in our guts, and we know very little about it with reasonable certainty other than some pretty basic things.

Diversity of species is important. How diverse? Which ones? - I'll go with the abovementioned "reply hazy, ask again later."

Eating enough fiber/plant material is important. How much? What kinds are better, or do you ideally want a mix of fibers within a certain range? How fixable is this? Is a supplement just as good as eating some cabbage?

Antibiotics fuck up the balance of species. What's the correct balance? How do you get back to it without resorting to a fecal transplant? How do we minimize the damage?

If you're interested, there's a whole fecal transplant rabbit hole of Ars articles to go through. Mostly Beth, of course - plus Dr. Gitlin writing about his cats.

https://meincmagazine.com/tag/fecal-transplant/

The question "What's normal?" isn't the whole question. The question should be "What's nominal for this individual?"

That's the elephant in the room no one can answer. The problem often lies with modern medicine's tendency to average things. Everyone get a specific dose of a particular medication, regardless of health (effecting metabolism and metabolic functions), gender, weight and a host of other factors that, for the "average human" would be sufficient and beneficial.

But the "average human" is a tiny minority of actual living, breathing people.

Because of this, the whole concept of "everyone is unique and must be treated as a unique individual" is alien to modern medicine. It tries using unique combinations of remedies that have been dosed for the average human being, which may or may not prove effective for the individual.

With gut biome, this issue is exponentially worse. There is no certainty that what works for "the average human being" will work for the individual (unless that individual is an "average human being", and even then, most medications might be beneficial, or might not be). There's just too much work left in figuring out how it impacts people and what's best for a specific individual.

It's certainly not beyond our ability to do that, but I don't see a lot of certainty happening yet in the way remedies are applied to be of any actual benefit to any individual. It's still very much miss, with very few hits. So gut biome health is still a huge work in progress to get right.