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(Credit: <a href="https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/bitter">Bitter Vectors by Vecteezy</a>) Watching this video on the history of Bitter taste receptors that are also present in the gut and on the skin got me thinking.... More questions than answers. Let me know if you have any of the answers so I can update this post! Some background to follow my thinking: Nicotine is bitter . About 10% of those who use low-dose nicotine patches ( according to our current research ) experience skin irritation . Low-dose nicotine collects at high rates in the gut when it comes from a patch -- as much as 80x compared to the amount in the bloodstream. Thus the digestive side effects even in smokers when the dose of patches is too high. Bitterness is not always bad, but evolution taught us that bitterness = danger. This is dying out in humans. The bitterness receptors in the gut don't connect with the brain directly like in the mouth. Their reaction is more local. This m...

Post-vax biomarkers -- it is not psychosomatic! "Screen capture from Dr Been's YouTube video on this topic" It has been obvious for years that the research into people who are post-COVID-vax injured would hold valuable insights for Long Covid, MECFS, POTS and many others who have also been suffering for years with similar symptoms -- even long before Covid ever came along! Note:   It took years for researchers to get past the stigma and finally start doing some real research on this subgroup of what could be called a post-viral injury ( PVI ), but it is not always viral... so a bigger umbrella would be Post-inflammatory-Injury (PII) or Post-Trauma-Injury, PTI or Post-Trauma-Syndrome PTS . I like the PTS term since it is more inclusive, but it is important to highlight the fact that "Trauma" here is being meant in the most broad sense of anything that causes inflammation can trigger this syndrome which I consider to be a kind to mTBI (minor Traumatic Brain Inju...