WARNING – GROSS

Sooooo I’ve been reading an article in the Washington Post on fecal bacteriotherapy, a medical procedure that sounds pretty technical but basically amounts to a shit transplant:

Apparently it’s for people whose intestinal bacteria has been destroyed by antiobiotics or disease, but I can’t get past the idea of drinking a diluted turd.

It is normally considered waste product, but it is in a way an independent organ, like the kidney, and it contains thousands of different bacteria living in symbiosis. These bacteria are needed for normal health. When you use some antibiotics, some of this bacteria population gets destroyed. If you later get infected with Clostridium difficile colitis, there is this competitive battlefield in the colon, and without the necessary bacteria, Clostridium has the upper hand. So what we do is take normal stool from a normal person, make an extract of it, put it in a blender with water, take two tablespoons of that cocktail, and introduce it into the patient’s body.