Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Alexandra Kassis's avatar

Having this perspective within the scientific community can feel incredibly isolating, so thank you for sharing this. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who truly sees—while the rest of the world races to gene-edit, prescribe, and vaccinate its way out of disease.

Lately, I’ve been carrying a deep sadness for humanity. No matter how far I explore, I always seem to arrive at the same root: dysbiosis. And yet, the scientific world celebrates every new drug that extends life by a few months—rarely stopping to ask what role our microbes play in the origins of disease. And on the rare occasion they do, the answer still becomes a product. Another pill. Another formulation.

Meanwhile, people proudly fill their carts with frozen “health” foods from Trader Joe’s, never noticing the palm oil quietly tucked into the ingredient list. Doctors continue prescribing antibiotics without a second thought—wiping out entire ecosystems our bodies depend on. Ecosystems our brains depend on.

And when depression sets in, not a single psychiatrist orders a stool microbiome test.

When a woman comes in with her 10th UTI, not a single doctor thinks to test her partner. Because our reproductive systems are assumed to be “sterile.” And nobody wants to look further—because looking deeper would mean acknowledging that the entire framework of modern life has to change. And people don’t want to change.

So thank you. Thank you for reminding me that I can separate myself from this world—because right now, I’m feeling extremely hopeless. It feels like things will only get worse unless we start taking real action.

The more I discover, the lonelier and more disconnected I feel—because the world we’ve built simply wasn’t designed to protect our microbial communities. It was built to destroy them. And sickness and death inevitably follow.

I really needed to be reminded of this today:

"We should not try to put all our energy into changing the external world. This is a pointless endeavor. Because only when we start to consciously strengthen our inner world, only then will we be able to change the outer world through us.”

— And to quote Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in this world.”

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts