Each week I follow what emerges from a set of Scholar Alert queries tuned to this project’s framework, pull the papers that are relevant, and trace what connects them. The prose sections make claims that no single paper makes alone. If that’s not interesting, the curated list still tells you what to read and why it matters. Everything here is free. Zotero collection links for paid subscribers are at the bottom.

This week’s subjects:

• Gut-Immune Axis / Microbiome

• Traditional Medicine + Autoimmunity

• Healing Frameworks / Ethnomedicine

• Immune Mechanisms / Ecological Frameworks

Gut-Immune Axis / Microbiome

Doyon-Laliberté makes the structure visible: BAFF, a signaling molecule that drives B-cell activation in the immune system, doesn’t just respond to gut disruption in long COVID. It feeds back into the gut barrier and the microbial ecology that produced it. The immune system reshapes the terrain that shaped it. Once you see that feedback loop, you see it everywhere in this week’s papers. Fu finds that aging itself passes through a microbial phase transition, a threshold crossing where the interior ecology shifts character and autoimmune prevalence shifts with it. Jung extends the frame to the oral cavity. Wang to the reproductive tract.

The body is a series of mucosal surfaces in ongoing negotiation, and immunity is the pattern of those negotiations. Ecosystems within ecosystems, each layer shaping the conditions for the one above it.

• Microbiota-induced intestinal barrier disruption drives BAFF-mediated B-cell dysregulation and autoimmunity in long COVID — Doyon-Laliberté et al., Preprint, 2026. This week’s structural key. BAFF feeds back into the intestinal barrier and the microbial ecology itself. Bidirectional causality: the immune system reshapes the terrain that produced it. From the abstract: “Here we show that non-hospitalized individuals with long COVID have intestinal barrier dysfunction associated with increased B-cell activating factor (BAFF), perturbation of the B cell compartment and autoimmunity that peak at 12 months after infection and begin to resolve by 24 months.” (Preprint)

• The dual roles of microorganisms in inflammatory diseases: initiators and regulators — Liao et al., Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences, 2026. Collapses the pathogen/commensal binary. Microorganisms are both.

• From dysbacteriosis to ecological remodeling: a new breakthrough in microbial treatment of IBD — Xie et al., iScience, 2026. Research on Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The gut is an ecology to be remodeled, not a system to be corrected.

• A global metagenomic atlas of aging identifies a microbiota phase transition associated with disease risk — Fu et al., npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, 2026. The aging microbiome passes through a phase transition, a sudden threshold where the interior ecology shifts character, and autoimmune prevalence shifts with it. From the abstract: “This perturbation was associated with a decline in ecological stability and substantial changes in the abundance of core species. Notably, the association between gut microbiota age and diseases was identified to be significantly altered before and after this inflection time.

• Oral Microbiome in Systemic Autoimmune Diseases: A Systematic Review — Jung, Militsi, Huck, Oral Diseases, 2026. Another mucosal surface (the mouth, which like the gut is lined with tissue that manages the boundary between inside and outside), another ecological conversation. 42 studies met inclusion criteria: 19 on rheumatoid arthritis (RA), 18 on primary Sjögren’s syndrome, 5 on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and 1 on anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody-associated vasculitis

Ayurveda + Autoimmunity

Shripat names Ojas explicitly. The concept is already there in the classical texts, already doing the work of describing vitality and metabolic capacity rather than surveillance and response. The vocabulary predates the discovery of the biomedical mechanism, which raises a question that all of the papers leave unaddressed: what kind of observation produced the vocabulary? What kind of attention produced the knowledge that this plant does something worth remembering?

Rajendran’s beverage plants paper touches something more specific than hormesis. The rasayana principle is sustained low-dose challenge that maintains the system’s responsiveness. Stimulation and suppression are both wrong frames. Ecological conditioning: a small regular demand keeps a muscle capable of more. The vocabulary of “immunomodulation” misses it, because modulation presupposes a system that needs adjustment from outside. Rasayana presupposes a system that can be strengthened from within, given the right conditions. This is a different model of what immunity is.

• Role of Ayurvedic Principles in Addressing Malnutrition and Non-Communicable Diseases — Shripat et al., Cureus, 2026. South Asian field research. From the abstract: “This review critically examines Ayurvedic principles as a complementary, systems-based framework for addressing shared nutritional and metabolic determinants underlying both conditions. Drawing on conceptual foundations and available empirical evidence, the analysis evaluates how dietary regulation, digestive optimisation, lifestyle modification, and Rasayana-based preventive strategies can be operationalised using locally accessible foods, herbs, and community-level delivery models.”

• Phytochemistry, pharmacology, and traditional uses of beverage plants with dietary hormetic potential — Rajendran et al., Food Chemistry Advances, 2026. Hormesis (the principle that a small dose of a stressor strengthens the system’s response) meets rasayana (the Ayurvedic practice of sustained low-dose tonic intake that maintains vitality). Low-dose challenge that maintains responsiveness.

Healing Frameworks / Ethnomedicine

Ethnomedicine papers consistently say: other knowledge traditions have been describing what Western immunology calls autoimmunity, using vocabularies that preserve the body as ecology rather than reducing it to a machine. This is the territory where autoimmunity is a set of disrupted relations.

• Decolonizing Mental Health in Algeria — Memchout, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2026. Jinn (spiritual beings in Islamic cosmology that can possess or afflict), baraka (blessing or spiritual power), sorcery as structured knowledge practices. From the abstract: “Algeria’s mental health system still bears the scars of a colonial asylum regime that delegitimized indigenous cosmologies and ruptured ties among self, family, community, and the sacred.” What happens when you take indigenous practices on their own terms?

• La Recta Provincia and the Logic of Resistance: Magic as Decolonial Heterotopia in the film Brujería — Ávalos, The Latin Americanist, 2026. Healing as cultural resistance. Colonial epistemology calls it sorcery. The Huilliche had their own categories, their own logic for why ritual works. 1. magic as epistemology; 2. magic as justice; 3. magic as territory, where physical and symbolic places resist the colonial hierarchies and mechanisms of domination.

Immune Mechanisms / Ecological Frameworks

• Decoding the exposome for type 1 diabetes prevention — Rollet et al., Diabetes & Metabolism, 2026. The exposome (the totality of environmental exposures a person encounters across their lifetime) as the field in which autoimmunity emerges. “Infectious agents, air pollutants, and early-life diet are well studied and consistently associated with T1D onset. However, little is known about the role of cumulative and combined exposures, or the exposome’s influence on disease progression and complications.” The gap they find is onset versus progression. The Ayurvedic and somatic practices live in that gap: what sustains dysregulation, not just what triggers it.

Bonus:

• The Body Is A Doorway, by Sophie Strand

  Make Me Good Soil

  The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order!

  I am SO excited to announce that my memoir about ecology and chronic illness The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order on all online bookselling platforms ahead of its release in March 2025. You can find different ways to order…

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  2 years ago · 220 likes · 50 comments · Sophie Strand

That’s it for this week! I’ve finally got a workflow that makes it reasonably possible for me to put these together on a regular basis. Hopefully you find something that piques your curiosity.