Fibromyalgia is an ill-defined chronic pain condition and claims around the gut microbiome are the latest craze in science-y sounding speculation about lots of health issues, following the fad of linking everything to what your grandparents ate at dinner, epigenetics. While in severe cases, microbiota are obviously important, last week the FDA warned the public about fecal transplants when a person died. The agency suspended clinical trials.

Chronic pain sufferers who can't get a specific diagnosis have dealt with woo promises from corporate marketing for a lot longer.

A new paper links the two, which is not going to be helpful to either group - some journalists are going to promote this as science when it is only an exploratory paper using statistical correlation. The beneficiaries will be nonsense probiotic yogurt companies. Yogurt will not make your pain go away.

The reason is simple. Short of a devastating illness and a treatment that wiped out good bacteria along with the bad, there is no evidence that any microbiotic treatment will be helpful. It is just anecdotes. And believing that any probiotic supplement is making a difference in trillions of bacteria is just silly.

But sometimes anecdotes are data. Once upon a time epidemiologists didn't latch onto every chemical and find a way to correlate it to cancer, they even dismissed hereditary links to cancer as anecdotal. Epidemiology won big with cigarette smoking and lost something nearly as a profound by refusing to accept that genetics weren't a risk factor in over 10 percent of cancers, something every person knows is true now.

Today it is the opposite.