The Great Question

The Great Question is:

What impact will this medicine or medical procedure have on my microbiome. And if it does have an impact, how will we monitor it and restore it to health?

The Great Question is a patient's response to The Great Assumption.

No Great Answers

Considering all the hype in the media these days about how important our microbiome is for good health, The Great Question sounds like a logical thing to ask your doctor. Right?

Not exactly. It is a valid question but unfortunately it is not a topic doctors are comfortable discussing. The health of our microbiome isn't something that is taken into account when considering the health of a person.

This leaves patients concerned about maintaining a healthy microbiome confused: Their doctor prescribes a medicine and they are interested in the risk to their microbiome caused by it so they know better how to patch it back to health. Unfortunately information like that is very hard to find if even available. Big Pharma may know but it is very unlikely they would share that information.

Why Ask?

So why ask your doctor The Great Question?

• To communicate to medical professionals that their patients are concerned about the health of their microbiome and the impact medical treatments have on its health.
• To make patients aware of the lack of capability of conventional medicine to monitor the health of the microbiome or address microbiome dysbiosis caused by illness or medical treatments.

Caveat

Asking your doctor The Great Question is unlikely to produce any usable info and is likely to create an uncomfortable moment with them because they know it is a valid question but don't have an answer.

Beware, asking The Great Question may earn you what I call the Mark of Elaine.

A Difficult Patient [Seinfeld - season 8, episode 5]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ2msARQsKU

So what is a patient to do?

It can be intimidating and unproductive to talk to your doctor about your microbiome.

At a minimum it is important for a patient to consider The Great Question in order to assess the impact a medical treatment will have on their overall health.

Absent any Great Answers, ultimately patients need a Microbiome Bill Of Rights to guarantee the sharing of information regarding the impact of a medical treatment on their microbiome. It is necessary to enable patients to be stewards of their own microbiome. But for the present, Asking The Great Question is a good place to start.