What continues to impress me is that minimal but repeated exposure to probiotic bacteria is yielding positive clinical outcomes. A new term used in my field for these good bugs is psychobiotics, following studies showing a connection between their consumption and positive psychological outcomes.21 Every functional medicine psychiatrist like me has case stories of the “probiotic cure”—of a patient with debilitating symptoms, often in the obsessive-compulsive range, whose symptoms vanished completely with dietary change and probiotic supplementation.
