on research into gut flora and autism

There are a lot of papers discussing gut flora and other dietary stuff to help treat issues with autism. There's ... fairly good evidence also on gut flora that help reduce anxiety. But there's a confluence of factors making it difficult to prove anything. For example, anxiety is already pretty hard to measure, and extremely subject to placebo. Then you add in how hard it is to tell what's really going on inside a living creatures gut ... Its been a major obstacle for that kind of medicine. There's real potential for "biotic" medicine, but its hard to prove anything, and when its hard to prove things, its hard to get funding and fda approval. When its hard to get money ... Its probably hard to blast off with a really "modern" use for this kind of thing. Like ... For example, a bio-engineered lactobacter that addresses a specific issue. You could probably do that, with millions of dollars and an extremely generous attitude from the people who decide to say "its OK to give this to humans". There are a lot of other kinds of things facing these same issues so I'm familiar with it. Psilocybes, for example. Or longevity medicines for humans. Aging isn't recognized as a disease so even though there are many drugs known to arrest it, they aren't allowed for that purpose in humans. Where its not profitable or it can't be 100% guaranteed, lots of papers and such pop up but it doesn't advance past a certain point. Gut medicine is little different though because if they had funding and weren't scared of ... like, the horrifying worst case scenarios ... maybe they really could design some crazy stuff that a person wouldn't be able to grow themselves so easily, so it would be profitable. On the other hand ... Couldn't a person grow even a designer lactobacter themselves ? Once they had it, probably they could.