A reader sent me this note which caused me to do some reflection and an experiment.

Maybe you can help me here.  I have two samples from February 2023 (where my function was 90% for the first time in years – I did not use antibiotics to achieve this event it just seemed to gradually happen over several weeks since starting valtrex (MicrobiomePrescription : valacyclovir hydrochloride is an antiviral)).

But then I crashed in March after taking, neem, tulsi and Lauricidin which wiped out my microbiome (at least the one I had before!).  Then on May 23rd sample my microbiome looked almost the same as February but I was only experiencing about 75% function.  There were some outliers like firmicutes to bac ratio being different and prausnitzii being lower than before – but other than that it looked ok.

Thoughts?

First, this antiviral has been used successfully for a subset of people with ME/CFS, see this 2016 post: Valacyclovir, EBV and CFS | CFS Remission

Second, what I did was compute a number based on the bacteria alleged to be Anti inflammatory and added it to Health Indicators page based on his observations and some research.

Where is it on the site?

These are computed on a per-processing-lab basis so the percentile will be appropriate.

This has limited value on a single sample (apart from screaming problems).

For this person we see (Biomesight):

• 2022-8-17: Score: 11.9   2.5 %ile
• 2023-2-24: Score: 13.51   93.2 %ile
• 2023-5-23: Score: 13.15   68.4 %ile

And this follows his subjective experience. Plotting the scores over all of the Biomesight samples, we get our typical score pattern.

User feedback after reviewing “I’ll look into these percentiles I’ve never thought they were useful before! Think I stand corrected.” There is no magic measure that does everything, there are many measures. Some useful for one person and just noise for someone else.