Then you need to explain how the fecal transplants triggered similar symptoms.

Maybe schizophrenia is not a sickness, merely a epi-genetic adaption to bad circumstances. Have a little civil war? Turn yourself into a twitching little zombie and walk it off?

So if you transport the message, you get a universal reaction.

Definitely. Eating patterns, sleep and many other things change. Even medications like lithium. What's lithium do to bacteria? My anxiety makes eating hard sometimes so i eat bad foods just to get calories in.

It is sad, because there is certainly a link, it’s not just the direct one that all academia is jumping to conclusions.

You pretty much nailed all those studies. Those type of hard to characterize, very complex, and poorly understood diseases, are the only candidates that you will see a “microbiome can cause/cure it” type of paper.

At the end of the day, they see a mouse, bearing a set of mutations that is not even close to mimic the disease population, adopt some new behaviors, and then they miraculously cured everything.

On top of that, VC have started to invest massively in that field, even starting their own company. On one side, I hope this will bring some much needed robustness to the current lack of rigor. On the flip side, since the biotech VC model is to IPO whithin 5 years, I doubt they will do better.

Or, more likely, they are both effects of the same root cause...

Or is there some third factor that causes both such as stress, high levels of innate immunity activation, etc.

Or it could be a feedback loop with multiple possible starting points.

I don't understand how these could possibly be mutually exclusive.