Bruno Bonaz
A clinician-scientist from outside the wiki’s usual disciplinary catchment, and the reason this wiki now has any gastroenterology in it at all. Bonaz is a hepato-gastroenterologist and neuroscientist at Grenoble whose work runs along a single axis — the vagus nerve — in both its directions: as the afferent channel carrying gut, microbial and inflammatory signals to the brain, and as an efferent target that can be stimulated to suppress peripheral inflammation.
The two claims his work rests on
The vagus as interoceptive interface. Bonaz’s 2018 review positions the vagus at the junction of the microbiota-gut-brain-axis — the nerve on which bacterial metabolites (short-chain fatty acids via enteroendocrine cells) and bacterial products (lipopolysaccharides via TLR4 receptors) act, alongside the body’s own inflammatory and mechanical signals. This is the anatomical basis for treating gut states as interoceptive states.
The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway. The efferent limb, and the more consequential clinical claim: vagal activity suppresses peripheral inflammation, so vagus nerve stimulation is not merely a neuromodulation technique but an anti-inflammatory one. This is what carries VNS from epilepsy (its original indication) to inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and — via the inflammation-to-depression bridge the wiki holds under sickness-behaviors — to psychiatry.
Where he sits in the wiki
Bonaz et al. (2021) is his only paper in raw/, and he leads an author list of seven whose sections track their own specialties. His are the gut, the vagus, and the translational close; Mayer’s is the brain-gut axis; Critchley’s the hypermobility and psychiatric material; Sinha’s the stress-addiction thread; Kenny’s the habenular nicotine circuitry; Lane’s the psychiatric framing; Oshinsky’s the NIH/NINDS pain and headache side.
He matters to this wiki for a structural reason rather than a theoretical one. Every other clinical voice here — Khalsa, Critchley, Garfinkel, Paulus — is a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and the wiki’s clinical picture had been correspondingly psychiatric. Bonaz is the first source treating interoception as a problem in internal medicine, with a therapeutic tradition (implanted devices, anti-inflammatory pathways) that owes nothing to the psychological interventions the rest of the wiki holds. See disorders-of-brain-gut-interaction, bioelectronic-medicine.
Reading caution
The 2021 review’s translational section is substantially Bonaz’s own programme, cited to his own papers, and the wiki holds the VNS material entirely at one remove with no trial read first-hand. The review declares no competing interests, but the framing incentive is worth noting the way the wiki notes it elsewhere (compare the Levine and SE disclosures, which are of a different and more direct kind — Bonaz has an intellectual stake, not a financial one on the record).