One of the most prominent focuses of health in the twenty-first century is gut health. Having too many bad critters—bacteria and other microorganisms—hanging out in the gut has been linked to numerous medical issues, including autism, obesity, diabetes, allergies, arthritis, autoimmune disorders, depression, and certain types of cancer, heart disease, fibromyalgia, eczema, and asthma. New links between chronic illness and an imbalanced microbiome (also known as gut bacteria) emerge almost every day, and the connection between the gut and inflammatory arthritis of all types is no exception.

While Western medicine has greatly advanced in treating acute disease, conditions that are easily fixed with a pill like an antibiotic, we’ve failed miserably in addressing chronic illness, health issues that linger because they have lifestyle issues like diet and stress as the root cause. In the mid-nineteenth century, the French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur, best known for developing the process of pasteurization, discovered the bug, or microbe, that causes infections; about seventy-five years later, a Scottish biologist named Alexander Fleming developed antibiotics to cure them. This simple cause-effect “cure”—single bug, single disease, and single drug—might work for infection, but not so much for chronic disease.