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It won't mean anything for the fobs, to be honest. The treatments have been under active development for over 30 years in some cases. The parents who want them are able to seek out the right doctors to get them; it's a question of convincing people that this is the treatment path to take, and getting average, insurance-taking doctors to order the tests for those who can't afford to travel and pay out-of-pocket for the visit until the insurance can reimburse them.
It does mean our GI doctor's medical license is that much safer, and maybe we won't have to speak in code so much. Like right now, I can tell him that a medication "worked" because there was an improvement in cognition or other neurological symptoms, and we can base further decisions on that, but he will always throw in a quick "and stools were improved a little too, right?" so that he can put it in the file as if we are still treating solely an unrelated GI disease. Similarly, every single child he sees must receive a full scope before he will treat them, even though he knows with complete certainty what he will find. He needs the scope data to prove that each of his patients has a real GI disease, and the fact that they all also have autism can be written off as a curious sidenote, if need be. Perhaps in the future he will feel safe enough to treat patients right off the bat, without all the CYA. I don't know how close he is to publishing his more recent data (including our own biopsies and pill cam images,) but I'd like to see him get a Nobel prize.
The real place for improvement is in early detection. If they can figure out which biomarkers show up first, and what ranges indicate that worse things are likely in store, they could add them to the list of basic blood screenings that every newborn gets. I do think we could reach a time in as little as 5 years when every newborn has a stool culture done to examine their gut flora, and more refined probiotic prescriptions can be developed with the most therapeutic blend of species. (Of course, correcting the mother's diet would also go a long way towards correcting this problem before it starts, but let's be honest, she's just going to give her baby a probiotic supplement instead.)
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