The Iron-Sulfur Cluster Crisis: Why Your Mitochondria Can't Recover (And Why Practitioners Don't Talk About It) — Why Practitioners Focus Everywhere Else

Why is this so invisible in functional medicine? Because Fe-S clusters are infrastructure . They&#8217;re not flashy. They don&#8217;t show up on microbiome tests. They&#8217;re not addressed by any standard supplement protocol. And they require understanding metabolic biochemistry, not just dysbiosis metaphors. Most practitioner frameworks are built around two ideas: (1) kill the bad bacteria, (2) feed the good bacteria. Neither addresses the host&#8217;s mitochondrial substrate crisis. Dysbiosis disrupts iron. Dysbiosis disrupts sulfur homeostasis. This prevents Fe-S cluster assembly. Mitochondrial dysfunction deepens. Dysbiosis perpetuates. You get stuck.