Hi, I'm Tyler Alterman, cognitive-science-researcher-turned-entrepreneur, 36 years old, and I have a mysterious gut condition. It has been causing me problems for over 8 years.

When it was at its worst: I went from being a happy person known for extreme amounts of energy to being a depressed bum who feels like poopy all the time. Since getting 9 different diagnoses from 9 different medical professionals and doing some self-experimentation, I'm now somewhere in between these two poles. ...But the condition remains undiagnosed and unsolved, hence this website designed for people who might help me solve it.

Right now I'm looking for is people who have a causal understanding of the gut-brain system.

UPDATE 1/11/26: I’m doing much better these days, even though the gut issue is still the most annoying problem in my life. I’m at maybe 80-85% of where I use to be – up from something like 45% four years ago. Woohoo! However, I’ve been hovering at 80-85% for 3 years now, so I’ll probably work on my gut thing again soon. (See more fine-grained updates in my chart below.) It’s really unclear what exactly helped, but here are some things I have higher confidence about:

• Motegrity/prucalopride cured the constipation for a couple years even after I stopped taking it. I now have occasional constipation again that goes away when I take Motegrity. I also discovered that many other symptoms were downstream of constipation: especially mood and social withdrawal.
• Candibactin AR seemed pretty helpful, it probably did reign in whatever SIBO or SIFO I had a bit.
• Most conditions like this are at least partially psychosomatic. Here are some things which helped a lot:
  • Moving near friends who I love in the city where I feel alive (NYC)
  • Finding projects that get me out of bed every day (eg https://fractalnyc.com/)
  • Not beating myself up for being dramatically less able to work in a “grindset” style. I’m still not able to work in this style for more than an hour or two a day, and only when the right body-mind state arrives. That’s OK, I’m just less productive in that way now and have found other ways to be productive.
• Also working with “woo” practicioners – bodyworkers, energy healers, etc – regularly had immense effects, bigger than anything else. But they would last only for a few hours. I still don’t know what would happen if I saw one of these people regularly. I’ll probably still explore this, but to be honest, I’m kind of allergic to their aesthetic. Big disclaimer here that maybe many (most?) professionals in this domain are quacks, and so I would be very discerning when picking one (and not talk yourself into believing that it’s working).

Anyway, the info below is not updated often, so please treat it as archival.

Table of contents

⏳ Before and after images

Before gut condition

After gut condition

Other images (click to englarge)

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😓 Symptoms