In one of the Reddit threads you link, someone ("WalterBishRedLicrish") said the following:
Third, this is poop we're talking about. You want their poop. For us in the medical or research fields, it's just stool and we don't think anything of it. For regular folks, it's disgusting. To frame it like good poop is not only a hot commodity, but we want your good poop because of how you look, that sends the request right on into creeper territory. It doesn't surprise me that someone blocked you, or that you get no response.
This seems to be exactly the sort of thing that NameHere was saying, and I have been noticing.
There seems to be a strong aversion among many people to the idea of using something from a healthy person's body to heal another person's body. The very fact that people who are seen as "ideal" in some way are wanted for something that their bodies produce, no matter whether obtaining it harms the donor at all, just causes a visceral "squick" response in some people.
I suspect it doesn't help that many of us in the position to need microbes from healthy donors aren't in a position to grasp the psychology of being someone who not only is healthy enough to live his or her
own life without being held back, but is wanted by
other people who idealize his or her body in some manner--it is almost Martian to us in level of unrelatability. We think "if that person is a decent human being, why
wouldn't he/she help me out?" I mean, even if and when someday I'm healthy enough to function well, I've lived so long being held back by my health, I would likely give stool, urine, saliva, sweat, what ever someone even thinks he or she might need from me to test out a theory. Since I did nothing on purpose to need to go on antibiotics to get me messed up like this, it would seem weird to me to feel "possessive" of a healthy microbiome, and feel any kind of contempt or disgust at someone who needs an infusion of microbes to function, so it seems like everyone else
should feel the same.
It's easy for us to get resentful that these people who stand between us and the health we had before, that we feel we still deserve, are human agents with their own willpower who can say no to our requests. I know I sometimes fall into that way of thinking. In the language of inane Internet portmanteaus, you could say we become "poopcels" or "microbiomecels". And like the incels that inspired these silly terms, there's something about that way of thinking that really puts certain people off in an instinctual sort of way. And those voices seem particularly pronounced in our culture right now.
Again, not everyone is like this, there are very generous people who would love to help, but their voices kind of get drowned out in our world.
Now, there IS also an opposing "instinct" that has also been just as prevalent across a number of world cultures--suggesting it's also partly "innate"--that imbues healthy young bodies with an almost magical or supernatural ability to heal others' problems. The manifestations of this range from the obviously very violent and cruel practice of infant sacrifice, all the way to the mostly innocuous even if strange-sounding "
virgin boy eggs" of China.
These two impulses seem to have kind of "dueled it out" across world history, and it so happens that in current Western culture, the tendency to be
weirded out by the concept of using healthy people's bodies as some kind of means to the betterment of others seems to have the upper hand. This has some good sides, that hopefully some truly harmful and exploitative non-consensual behavior that was overlooked in the past is finally being brought to light; however the downside is that some genuinely good and benevolent ideas have become a hard sell just because of people's hyperactive squick detectors. So something like FMT, which is as harmless to the donors as those Chinese eggs, yet has a MUCH greater weight of evidence supporting its benefit and considerable plausibility given what we know about the gut, is difficult to promote.
You could say that the concept "culturally smells", and when you add the
literal, olfactory stink of (most) stool, you get something many people don't want to touch--and that
others (such as politicians) avoid to not trigger the sensitivities of
those people. In order to overrule this "cultural stink", one would need considerably stronger evidence than just "the gut microbiome plays a role in many diseases".
That's why there are all these scientists studying the gut who promote things like the Mediterranean diet and so few promoting FMT. There's nothing culturally unsavory about promoting a Mediterranean diet, in fact quite the opposite--many people like Italian food and nobody or nothing is reasonably exploited to create it. Yes, there's scientific evidence for the Mediterranean diet, but a lot of the strength of that evidence can be attributed to how "fashionable" it is to study. If there was as much study of FMT as there has been of the Mediterranean diet, we'd probably have tons of people doing it now.
Then, due to the lack of good data, another cultural phenomenon comes into play--the fear of charlatans and being labeled as an intellectual heretic. Contrarily to the aversion to someone seeking donors, which relates to fears about the healthy donors being manipulated or used in some way, this relates to the fear that the
sick recipients may be preyed upon or that people might attempt to "steal" prestige that they aren't due.
In my understanding, FMT only gets the negative response it does because of
all three of these things working together. FMT would be better researched if high quality donors were more available, which would happen if the process didn't weird people out. With a lack of good research, the evidence isn't strong enough to overpower the "cultural stink". And leaders who are aware of the "cultural stink" don't dare support it unless there were doctors to "clinic-wash" the whole thing and cover up the visceral offputtingness of
putting something from one person into another. So the whole field languishes.
That's why tons of
other health practices and views (like anti-vax-ism) that many scientists consider pure quackery nonetheless have a flourishing market, and proponents of them even get very high in politics--yet FMT "dare not say its name".
And your comment that 70% of people would be willing to try FMT for C. diff doesn't contradict any of this. People like that would be acutely, seriously ill with a well recognized disease, at a point in their lives when their dignity is at a nadir. They would be getting treatment in a hospital by doctors who remove any trace of the "person-to-person-ness" of the transplant, and for this indication the proof of effectiveness is very strong. All this context
does matter. This is very different from for example asking people if they would consider
donating stool to a person suffering from diseases like ME/CFS, which some ignorant people think of as "just stress".
