I have autoimmune diseases, and I'm in a constant search for lifestyle changes which could potentially improve my condition. If you start to read up on health issues like this, you really quickly end up reading about food sensitivities, leaky gut, gut biome problems, and inflammation.<p>However, if you go to a doctor, then there is 95% chance that you won't hear about any of these. Alternative medicine was always around, but this feels like an alternative but somehow scientific (or maybe just pseudoscientific) parallel universe. It sounds intriguing (because it makes me believe that my officially incurable diseases are actually curable), but I have this general uneasy feeling that I can not understand this phenomenon.<p>Is this "gut problems are behind everything" theory is just simply quackery? Or is this just that we are more connected to new information, and these are just the ongoing changes in the scientific knowledge, which will be picked up later by the slow moving medical protocols? Or is this just some cherry picked information, which is not really relevant, because we could cherry pick other stuff too if those would be our personal preference? What is happening here? I consider myself a science geek, I would generally avoid unproven alternative therapies, but here I start to have the feeling that something real is going on and the doctors are just lazy to pick it up. But I may be completely mistaken by my wishful thinking! Some signs are surely positive, e.g. lots of articles in medical journals about the topic. Some other signs are suspicious, e.g. the whole detoxification and anti-vaccine vibes surrounding these concepts. Also the dieting ideas in this scene are so contradictory, that it makes me feel that this has nothing to do with science (lots of vegetables vs carnivore vs AIP vs mediterran etc).<p>Please, medical professionals of HN, let me understand this phenomenon.