First results from our 1 in 23,000 stool donor (2022, HumanMicrobes.org) Blog
- Thread starter Michael Harrop
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This is totally it. Someone I know who is looking for a donor posted on a forum for residents of a town near her, asking for donors, and some people were apparently downright RUDE to her. I just saw one that hinted sideways that he was questioning whether she might be some kind of pervert, but didn't outright make accusations. However she told me that there was someone much ruder who had responded, who had since deleted his or her comment.
Many of us who are looking for donors have mental health challenges that already can make us seem weird, creepy, or otherwise offputting even when we're NOT doing something like looking for a donor for bodily excretions or fluids, and we're desperate for help which doesn't help matters. What we could really use are people to form a "bridge" between us and donors, who know people socially and can put them at ease, that we could tell what we're looking for and they could do the initial outreach.
Michael has put in TONS of hours of work to interview thousands of people--however he hasn't found a truly effective donor in years. I suspect there is something about how he is putting things out there that is turning off normal, healthy people. And I suspect that something is also putting off senators in Washington. Quite possibly not exactly the SAME thing; with donors it might be things like asking for stool pictures and posting them online with commentary, whereas with politicians it might be claims about "curing all chronic disease"--and in both cases the ick factor of the method itself plays a role.
This is a very good point. This is what Gezonde Darmflora and Microbioma are doing that HM didn't do. Yes, they DID do stool testing of the donors themselves, and the results of this were posted online so nobody had to merely take Michael's word on it, though it's unclear how often this was done. A casual reader of the site would be forgiven in thinking this was only done ONCE per donor, if in fact it was done more often (the strictest sellers do this monthly--plus retaining aliquots of actual shipment-ready donations for quality control). The samples that were divided up into capsules/enemas and actually sent to customers were shipped directly from donors in the mail--Michael/HM never touched them, so retaining a small amount for quality control/tracing would have been impossible.
Michael claims that screening donors by questionnaire and stool type verification by picture makes a lot of this unnecessary, but there is literally no evidence that it does. And I say this as someone who suspects I could get very good at picking good donors in terms of efficacy by their personality/"energy" in combination with their health history, after trying a number of donors, and suspect I would be even better if I also could consider things like the odor of the stool itself. But this all concerns efficacy only--in other words who has the type of microbes I need. It doesn't say anything about whether they happen to be sick with something at the moment--THAT is the purpose of lab testing, NOT to determine who has the microbes that who needs (scientists agree that microbiome science is not far enough along for that).
For those of us who don't have access to a lab to run tests as often as we'd like, many of us try donors with less frequent testing if they look promising enough, rather than forgo using that donor. However, we must be careful not to try and justify this to ourselves or others by pretending that more frequent lab testing is useless and unnecessary. If and when people with more resources join a project, they will understandably ask "where is the testing", and if they are truly "behind" the project, will devote a considerable investment to making this possible. It won't be something we need to argue against because nobody will be dissuaded from helping by the need to invest in this. There is no point in responding to providers with labs using low quality donors by going to the opposite extreme and acting like labs are unnecessary with good quality donors.
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Michael Harrop
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Definitely. But this is the problem that Human Microbes solves, since we no longer have to interact with potential donors. Human Microbes depersonalizes things.
I have 7 donors ranked above the top active donors. So it's possible that I have found one or more but they haven't been tested yet.
You simply need to read the blogs for the answer to this.
Also, implying that "normal healthy people" aren't applying is completely wrong. I have thousands of "normal healthy people", much better than the donors at other FMT sources around the world.
Again, the answer is already in another thread.
This is not true, and it's been explained to you multiple times. So you're either trolling or have a severe learning disability that you're unable to keep in mind and adjust your behavior accordingly.
You can argue the evidence is not strong, and I would agree that it needs to be confirmed in an ample-sized study, but "literally no evidence" is a lie.
Everything is a cost-benefit balance. People are going to weigh things differently depending on their personal knowledge and experience, which is why Human Microbes largely leaves it up to recipients.
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