Amen!
Stomach ulcers are entirely curable even though there's the potential for them to come back after an overgrowth of h. Pylori or several other factors that might contribute due to environmental factors - not immune dysfunction or bad DNA. In the same sort of way, people with IBD are being cured all the time. Afterwards, they tend not to hang out on forums much but they often report their successes. I genuinely hope we'll all fall into that category at some point.
Guardian7 said...
Marauder93 said...
@Guardian - You know better than the claim that UC is curable. Just because people go into remission for a long time does not mean the disease will never come back. Some people just get lucky and have 15-20 year remissions for no discernible reason. They may claim their disease is "cured" but it is not. Given enough time and the right conditions, it ALWAYS comes back. Besides, as you know, case studies/case reports are the lowest level of scientific evidence on the hierarchy. It means very little except for preliminary evidence.
But that's what I don't get...
If someone has severe UC pathology and is on the verge of surgery, then decides to get FMT done and that treatment eliminates UC pathology, and this is confirmed through colonoscopy (and no medication usage for years), how do we differentiate that person's colon from a normal person's colon? They both look the same on the scope. They both have the same bowel patterns. They both don't have any symptoms for years, if not decades. They both aren't taking any supplements or doing any dietary modifications.
From my understanding, FMT normalizes the recipient's flora to match the donor's flora over time, which is why you would not be able to tell the difference between the two. That's as empirical as you can get. It seems to me like people are creating this ghost of UC in people that no longer have it anymore, because we desperately want to believe that it is incurable.
As for scientific evidence, you also know well enough that a study is five times more likely to show positive results if it is funded by the manufacturing drug company. In other words, you can't trust pharmaceutical data at face value because it is elaborately ghost written, using relative risk reductions to make more effective than it really is. There is hardly any ethics and integrity left in modern medicine. This especially applies to biologic data because it is shady and misleading, with confounding variables (combo therapy, steroid usage) all over the place.