Why Dysbiosis, SIBO, Hydrogen Sulfide Intolerance, MCAS, and Long COVID May All Be Downstream of a Single Event — The standard story — and why it stops short

Open almost any conversation about gut health and it begins in the same place: dysbiosis, an imbalance in the community of microbes living in the intestine. We talk about low microbial diversity. We talk about depleted butyrate producers — the beneficial bacteria that ferment fiber into short-chain fatty acids. We talk about elevated Proteobacteria and expanded Enterobacteriaceae (families of bacteria that bloom in inflamed, leaky, oxygen-exposed guts). We talk about hydrogen-sulfide organisms, methane organisms, histamine-producing bacteria, parasites, yeast. We talk about low Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, low Roseburia, low Akkermansia, low Bifidobacterium, low Lactobacillus. All of that is real. All of that matters. I am not here to dismiss a single line of a stool report. But notice what the standard story never asks. It catalogs which organisms are present or missing, and then it tries to add back the missing ones and kill the excess ones. It almost never asks the prior question: Why did the host lose the ability to maintain this ecosystem in the first place? Because here is the uncomfortable truth that anyone who has treated complex cases eventually runs into: you can give the "right" probiotics, the "right" fibers, the "right" antimicrobials, and the ecosystem still refuses to stabilize. The good organisms won't take. The bad ones come back. You are pouring seeds onto so