There is so much to say here, that's why I haven't replied yet because I've been thinking how to say it without it getting too incredibly long.
@SFBayFMT5 Why would he care about trying to vindicate himself to the public again? He tried already to tell everyone he found a panacea, but got ignored because of his lack of social credit, the rejection of the average public and the corruption of the government, corporations and academia.
I don’t think you get what he has said already but I will engage with you:
It is not strange to assume that he already has found multi-millionaire investors and funding for his operations that he just isn’t announcing to the world.
I mean, he talks a lot about how many people have ignored him, but he likewise has repeatedly stated how many others in the medical and research fields have been interested in HM donors and in his approach as well, including some Hadza researchers. Not only that, but he has been advocating online for 10+ years and he probably got some big names during his ≈11 month stay in DC.
Sorry to break it to you if you haven't noticed already, but pretty much everywhere except from on this forum, HM is practically a non-entity. If it's ever even brought up, most of the time it's because Michael himself brings it up, and most of the rest of the time it's in a negative light, not because people have gotten horribly sick from HM FMTs, but because of how overhyped they see it as being relative to what it has actually delivered (see below).
Why in the world would researchers studying the Hadza care about HM? To my knowledge Michael has no connections among the Hadza, and if they want to have people on a Westernized diet as a control group, they can just pay some college undergrads $40 to give them a stool and not have to deal with shipping and be able to control all the variables they want at their own lab. They would have no reason to pay HM to send them a sample from someone likely living in another state. Just think about it for a moment. The only place I've ever seen the Hadza and HM mentioned together is that Michael knew a different recipient, who was never himself affiliated with HM, who used one or more Hadza donors, and if I remember correctly he (unsurprisingly) got worse from those donors due to the pathogens they carry that Western immune systems aren't used to.
So yes, I can totally believe that he wouldn't have found multi-millionaire investors. Michael has some interesting hypotheses, but he
screened over a million potential donors without the track record of his customer results, or even his own results, actually showing any visible increase.
I am very familiar with how applying for scientific funding works, I've helped principal investigators in labs prepare data for grant applications before. Each time you apply, you have to lay out what new experiments you have done since the previous time you applied, and what concrete progress you have made toward the goal, with data (charts, graphs) to back it up. Many investigators pore over their data for many long nights each time funding renewal comes around to figure out how to not give the reviewers any hint of a reason to question whether the data really support the hypothesis. Yet Michael seemed to act as though it should be
plainly obvious that his donors are the best in the world.
Nowhere that I'm aware of can you propose even an excellent-sounding idea, then do a thousand of pretty much the same experiment with the outcome being largely the same, and then say "but my idea is good dammit, so give me funding for a hundred more experiments, I
promise you we'll have results then". They expect to see cycles of the info gleaned from earlier experiments driving changes in later experiments that have a measurable impact on the outcome. That's why I proposed that Michael do exactly this--find a way to arrange HM's results so they show
some sort of progression.
Do you really think he probably hasn’t gotten the phone number of some wealthy potential clients at this point? Or that he probably hasn’t made business with them already?
He just doesn’t announce it to the world because wealthy clients are more secretive than your regular person. He probably even is on an NDA lol.
Now
THAT I can imagine. You can pretty much always find desperately sick people who will pay large sums of money to work with someone who promises them a cure. In my time I've seen my share of alternative doctors who charge patients an arm and a leg for treatments that end up not actually helping them, some even have been hurt and ended up in the hospital almost dying, yet those patients go back to these "doctors" for more treatment and even defend them legally when they are hit with malpractice lawsuits (for performing treatments that almost kill their patients), they are so convinced that those practitioners have the answer.
If Michael wants to stand apart from these quacks, he has to make a real effort to cross his T's and dot his I's in presenting his data.
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Regardless, Michael is right in that he did everyone a favor by giving people an organized resource like this forum and the wiki that explain the way his method works. Without this or other knowledge, a layperson like me would be more likely to risk FMT to the nearest available source.
I don’t expect Michael to be God and have infinite forgiveness and mercy after all his negative experiences with average people, specially in his ill state where being inconvenienced hits 10 times harder than an able-bodied person.
Yes Michael put in a tremendous amount of work, and the FDA in many ways showed poor scientific sportsmanship (sciencemanship? intellectualship?) by,
rather than proving him wrong, just pointing to an arbitrary rule in a book to tell him he shouldn't be working towards what he was trying to do. However, even if he'd been thrown in jail for his supposed "medical sins", that suffering wouldn't mean that somehow he was proven right and absolve him of responsibility to consider his actual results if he wants people to invest in his project.
At the VERY end of HM, there were only two glimmers of improvement I saw. One was a donor who cured his depression with a brand new and young donor, yet he had to be very careful in how to take the capsules to not cause
new symptoms. In my experience when a FMT really works, it isn't like this.
And then there was this experience of Michael's from December 2025:
https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/humanmicrobes-org-donor-or_jo_1993-treating-cfs-ibs-and-more-benefits.176/.
He says:
This is a great donor. They should be very safe, and would likely be highly beneficial for many people, but overall, they were only mildly beneficial for me...
I know that more effective donors exist, and I'll keep looking for them, but even if I can find someone who perfectly meets the ideal criteria, and they turn out to be highly effective, I think that they're so rare that they can't be depended upon.
Keep in mind, Michael already had his full approach laid out, including knowing about stool type being a factor, in his roadmap
all the way back in 2019! And in December of 2025 he was still saying the above. Is it any wonder that people weren't too willing to invest in a remote possibility that probably wouldn't materialize?
When Openbiome realized that they weren't having the uniform success they had hoped for, they shut down FMTs and went from treating patients to doing research. They effectively decided that treating patients had been premature, which was a shame for the patients like myself who were helped drastically by them, but they considered their efforts were better placed elsewhere.
In the experience report I quoted from above, Michael mentioned the possibility that biofilm clearance was necessary for FMT to actually be a cure for most patients. He
could have decided at that point to completely stop pushing his donors, test several different methods of biofilm disruption using the donors he already had, and publish the results on here, which could have helped guide us to try the best one(s) with whatever donors we had access to, such as those from Gezonde Darmflora, Purety clinic, etc. We could have helped him refine the protocol with our own experiments. Then if
after doing this some of us
still thought they needed HM donors specifically, they could have helped him get his business back together. This would have completely gotten the FDA off his back, unless he tried selling unapproved anti-biofilm drugs to us, and could have actually helped some of us, but it would have meant that he couldn't have made any money off of FMT for the time being.
If that were the choice he would have made, I would have nothing but respect for him. But that was NOT what he did, he decided that instead he'd focus on the lack of monetary support for his donor program, that we had no role in shutting down, and use that as an excuse to stop working to help this community. When a lot of people's unwillingness to help I'm sure came from the lackluster results everyone (including Michael) was getting. I know that I could have gotten some family members to chip in a substantial amount of money to help me pay for treatments from Michael if the data were actually there that it was a good investment. But they have seen too many people promising cures and not delivering (as have I).
