Why It's Impossible to Treat Chronic Gut Dysfunction at the Bacterial Level — Layer 3: The Immune Signaling Collapse That Standard Testing Misses

This is the layer most practitioners never get to, because the markers they&#8217;re taught to trust don&#8217;t see it. It&#8217;s also the layer that explains why so many patients with chronic gut dysfunction have been told, repeatedly, that their tests look &#8220;normal&#8221; while their body is falling apart. Why calprotectin misses this Fecal calprotectin is the marker most gastroenterologists lean on to decide whether your gut is &#8220;inflamed.&#8221; If it&#8217;s elevated, you get taken seriously. If it&#8217;s normal, you get told it&#8217;s functional &#8212; which is medical shorthand for we don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s wrong with you, and we&#8217;re going to act like nothing is. Here&#8217;s the thing. Calprotectin measures one type of inflammation only: neutrophil-driven inflammation . Neutrophils are the immune cells that rush to sites of acute infection or IBD-type inflammation. Calprotectin is their signature. When neutrophils are at work, calprotectin goes up. When they&#8217;re not, calprotectin stays low. But neutrophils are not the inflammation that drives chronic gut dysfunction. Mast cells are. Eosinophils are. Innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) are. Mitochondrial damage signals (DAMPs) are. Sustained low-grade endotoxemia from LPS translocation is. None of these show up on a calprotectin test. Here&#8217;s what I keep finding: Fecal calprotectin &#8212;