So now you might be thinking weve stooled to a new low in our bathroom humor. Well folks I shit you
not this is a serious issue.
I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast about “The power of poop” .
Long story short the quick summation is- healthy people with antibodies and good bacteria in their stool can transfer those antibodies and bacteria to others via a fecal transfer. You still there?
I could hardly believe this when I heard it. So a cursory check showed that this is a procedure that has been done for awhile now albeit on a low key level probably more from skepticism than anything else.
Following is an excerpt from the Freakonomics page:
“How is this accomplished? (Okay, hold your nose for a moment.) A fecal transplant. Yes, you read right: taking the stool from a healthy person, mixing it with a saline solution, and injecting it into an ill person. The procedure resembles a colonoscopy; it’s a sort of combination of organ transplant and blood transfusion, which one doctor in our podcast calls a “transpoosion.”
Fecal transplants go back several decades, but momentum is unquestionably building, thanks largely to a rise in bench science looking into the bacterial environment of the gut — and that is due to the latest DNA technologies and computational techniques.
In this podcast, you’ll hear from two researcher/practitioners: Thomas Borody, a Polish-born gastroenterologist who works at the Centre for Digestive Diseases near Sydney, Australia; and Alex Khoruts, a Belarussian-born gastroengerologist and immunologist at the University of Minnesota. (Here’s one Borody paper on the topic, and here’s one from Khoruts; both are gated.) You’ll also hear from one of Borody’s patients, William Kostopoulous, who received a fecal transplant to treat his multiple sclerosis. According to both men, the treatment worked marvelously; Borody is currently setting up medical trials to try to establish proof.” -end quote the rest of the story can be found here
The video below describes the procedure, a first in Oklahoma!
Of course though it wouldn’t be The Evil von Scarry Show unless we speculated what might happen if things went horribly horribly wrong…. -EvS