This is fixable. Please don’t give up.

My friend got diagnosed with M.s. and wants to die. What would you tell yourself if you were in this situation? — Anon

Tell her that if it is Multiple Sclerosis it may be driven by gut problems driving inflammatory response in the brain. The gut problems may also be causing her to be more anxious and depressed than she should be. Don’t let them win.

The guy behind bulletproof coffee had it in college and he fought it off with diet. So did Terry Wahls. They both appeared to do things that would have a huge impact on gut health.

A keto diet, some short 3 day fasting, kefir with L Reuteri, small amounts of cannabis, and lots of collagen peptides have all helped me.

I had fairly good symptom alleviation until I lost access to food. My FMT was a yolo measure, but I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. It does highlight how much the gut plays a roll in this space.

There are a large number of examples in the science literature about various forms of m.s. being basically cured after FMT.

Fecal microbiota transplantation associated with 10 years of stability in a patient with SPMS (2018)

I’ve been treating it like diabetes type II and essentially a lipid processing problem. Boost stomach acids (bile) and promote mucus. This helps get fats and cholesterol to the immune system and remylinate the brain. She is also probably low on serotonin, but the answer here is not SSRIs if it is a gut problem. Need to feed the body what it needs to make serotonin, which is vitamin D, tryptophan, omega 3s, and niacin.

This gut problem seems to be a common problem in every neurodegenerative disease and overlaps with metabolic disorders.

Kefir and kombucha can help mitigate risks from high fat high salt diet, giving body more room to replenish bile and lipid function.

Other nutrients like Thiamine (B1) are big ways that can help with mood. Many of these would be made naturally by gut bacteria. If those species are missing, then she’d be low on many vitamins. This can make all the underlying problems worse.

I ended up self medicating with energy drinks here, but there are more nutrient dense foods that are cheaper.

One of the more alarming things on my radar is how it may be from the vaccines, or from COVID itself. We are very close to understanding why. They use a mouse strain of coronavirus to trigger neurodegenerative diseases in mice. It’s probably the ACE receptors in the gut causing gut dysbiosis.

FMT works on the mouse models too.

Protection of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in a Mouse Model of Multiple Sclerosis (2020)

Food allergies messed me up somewhat on top of this. Highly recommend some kind of food tracking. I used cronometer cuz it could tell me nutrients as well.

Tracking food and bowel movements is often enough to get a doctor to help with tracking down GI disorders. Tho they are unlikely to prescribe dietary interventions that would help here. Especially as the gut microbe angle is so new. Good ones might know about this space of ideas and can recommend dieticians, but you’re more like to be pushed into taking some kind of autoantibody that is all the rage these days.

The hard part is that diabetes a like environment and other food problems can drive fungal infections. This directly thwarts attempts to repair gut health. It’s not insurmountable, but can mean direct FMT may not be safe until any fungal infection is cleared. For me the Crohn’s disease (a form of IBD) seemed to be driven by that. Many doctors are unlikely to suspect fungal infection in the gut because the symptoms don’t align with what they are trained to look for.

Current pharmacological antifungal treatments are hell on the gut microbiome and kill off commensal (good) fungal species, which can drive complications.

There are herbal options that help, as well as stuff like serotonin and butyrate (in butter, made from fibers like collagen). The L Reuteri species is a protective agent here. Many people with M.S recovery swear by raw food vegan diet. They are likely growing their own garden veggies with low pesticides and as such are replenishing their gut via soil bacteria. That didn’t work for me, but I seem particularly challenged toward bile dysfunctions, so I have to eat cholesterol directly.

I do not like eating animals so I focus on eggs and dairy (Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarian).

With the gut problems, at a fundamental level what we are talking about is a sort of acute starvation. Lack of ability to absorb lipids (fats etc.) tips the body over into a sort of pseudo-hibernation state. Infections like COVID seem to be inducing this partially/artificially because during hibernation an animal’s immune system shuts off. All the immune cells seem to live off of ketones and are also regulated heavily by fat derived molecules (short chain fatty acids made by gut bacteria).

So when those stop entering the system over time the immune system shifts into an autoimmune profile. And in the case of M.S. the microglia in the brain start harvesting myelin as an emergency cholesterol reserve. This actually shows up near 1:1 in hibernating ground squirrels, with them having to regrow their brain each spring from healthy fats from nuts and seeds they stock up on in the fall.

TL;DR: This is fixable. Please don’t give up.