Idea of communal living for TMAU sufferers

 

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a doctor or medical professional of any kind, and nothing here is medical advice.

A few months ago I made a long post about the diet I used to successfully eliminate this condition about 20 years ago. (see my profile for that post, and other posts I think may be helpful as well). I have been thinking a lot about options for people who are not able to cure their problem through dietary change. They may only get a partial solution that still leaves them with a significant problem, or they may require a diet too extreme to maintain it for life.

The other day I believe I have come up with a real solution. The idea is that people with TMAU need to move to live near one another, or with each other. If just 10 people organized online and moved to no more than say a 30min drive from each other, you would have a real social network and would no longer be isolated. If this worked well, other people would likely be inspired to do the same thing, and soon there would be 50 or more people living only a short distance from each other. The recent advent of remote work makes this much more feasible than it would have been in the past.

Of course everyone would share their contact details so this would work, and a small community would be formed. People would need to do some Zoom meetings before actually moving in person, to make sure they will be forming a social network that everyone wants to be a part of.

Perhaps a group of people with this condition could share a house (some cautions about that later in this post).

The basic concept here is that there is a group of people who will accept you with your condition that is not being utilized - other people with the same condition! They may or may not be able to smell you, but even if they can, they should be willing to accept you in a way the rest of society won't.

This concept solves the problem of dating as well. How in the world are you supposed to date when you have a serious TMAU issue? The answer is to date other people with the same condition. If the symptoms are very similar, than they are likely nose-blind to you in the same way that you are to yourself. This is based on hearing about how TMAU meetups usually go. So if you have a strong fecal smell you can't fix, I think that clearly the answer to dating/relationships is to date people with the same condition. For males, this would cause asking someone out from being unthinkable to being completely doable.

A dating pool would open up if you had small population of people with this condition living fairly close to each other, but this is not the only option. Using Zoom meetings, potential partners could virtually meet, and if things look promising one could fly out to meet the other, and then take things from there.

A word of caution though. It is very common to hear about people passing this condition down to their children. If you have two people with TMAU, the risk of a child being born with this would much too high. So, they should not have children, unless they were adopted, in my opinion. Having biological children, if both parents have this condition, would be playing with fire, at least in my view.

People with TMAU and related conditions are about 80% female. This is based on a medical study I read, and this lines up well with everything I have observed online. Since females have many more dating options than males when it comes to this condition, the dating pool would not be as lopsided as it may appear. Many females report that only real loser or predatory guys are attracted to them, but a significant number are able to find quality partners. For males, the idea of asking someone out with this condition is usually unthinkable. Also, females tend to react worse to this condition than males do.

I really think that the idea of people with this condition living near/with each other is the one and only realistic solution for people unable to eliminate this condition through a dietary change. I and others have talked a bit in the past about how people should live life normally despite the condition, but that is much easier said than done. You would have to both not care about making others uncomfortable, and not mind reactions from others, and I am not sure anyone can actually do this.

TMAU is largely being used as a blanket term for a general malodor condition, and there are likely countless underlying causes for these. It would require unimaginable resources to try and create medical solutions for all these underlying causes. If a sustainable diet can't cure this, than it probably can't be cured. No diet for this has any value unless it can be sustained for life.

As these are mostly metabolic problems, I suspect that a liver transplant would probably cure most of them, but you would not qualify for one for this. It would require a huge movement to have people with TMAU qualify for liver transplants, and I don't see an organization capable of making this happen. There would need to be tests developed that could definitely show this is a liver issue before a transplant would ever be considered as well.

So, simply ignoring peoples reactions and living life normally is probably impossible for the vast majority of people, and if a dietary solution can't be found than there probably isn't a cure, and living an isolated life would be no real life at all for most people. This why I think that people with this condition making the effort to live close to one another is the only conceivable solution.

It is the fact that there is not any other realistic solution that should inspire people to push through the challenges required to make this a reality.

Again, the basic underlying concept here is that there is a potential community of people who will accept you (other people with this condition), but this potential is not being utilized (at least as far as I know).

Some words of caution about the idea of moving into a house with a group of people with TMAU. A long time ago I read that people with this condition frequently slide into drug and alcohol abuse. Common sense says this must be the case with a condition like this. So you would need to carefully screen anyone you are going to live with, and not have utopian and naive ideas about this.

Another concern I have about this is that you may be dealing with people who have been effectively cut off from dating due to this condition, and suddenly that would cease to be a barrier. This could lead to a problem of out of control sexual desires for the other people they are living with. Having everyone in a shared house be of the same gender would therefore be a good idea. It may - or may not - be the case that the people posting on forums like this and making youtube channels are more high functioning and less self destructive than the average person with this condition.

Living near, rather than with people would a safer, and simpler idea than sharing a house due to the above concerns. I think sharing a house could work well, it just demands some Zoom meetings to screen people first, so you don't end up living with someone with a severe substance abuse problem for example.

If people actually follow through with creating a small, real world community of people with this condition, than instead of just isolating on friday and saturday night, you could get together and have a party if you wanted. You would no longer be socially isolated, and if you had a remote job, you may very well be able to make your life actually work, even without being able to cure your condition.

The key is just to get a small group of people to live near/with each other, and then have them report back that it went well, and it will naturally grow from there. If people agree this is a good idea, but nobody actually follows through with this, then this is just a meaningless forum post. The ability of medical science to actually be able to treat the likely countless underlying causes of this condition could literally be centuries away, but the ideas I have laid out in this post could start being implemented tomorrow.