Diarrhea, Debilitating Digestive Ills Relieved With DIY Fecal Transplants [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

Demonstrating that even in medicine, "one man's trash is another man's treasure," patients with debilitating diarrhea are finding relief, if not cures, after receiving bacteria-rich stool from the guts of healthy donors, usually close relatives.

Despite the gross-out factor, fecal transplants are simple enough to perform at home using such inexpensive tools as a bottle of saline, a 2-quart enema kit from the local drugstore and a standard kitchen blender.

"Some of my patients tell me within three hours of having this that they feel better," said Dr. Lawrence J. Brandt, emeritus chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., who has performed about 25 fecal transplants since 1999.

The approach, also called fecal bacteriotherapy, is hardly new. Dr. Ben Eiseman, the longtime chief of surgery at Denver General Hospital, reported in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology in 1958 that enemas containing feces from healthy colons successfully replenished good digestive bacteria in patients suffering from pseudomembranous colitis, a painful colon inflammation associated with a bacterium called Clostridium difficile. Dr. Thomas J. Borody, from the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Sydney, Australia, reported in the same journal in 2003 that "human probiotic infusions" reversed ulcerative colitis in six patients, each of whom had been sick at least five years with the inflammatory condition. All remained disease-free in one to 13 years of follow-up.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/diarrhea-debilitating-digestive-ills-relieved-diy-fecal-transplants/story?id=13601702

Reading last page interesting also experimenting with on obese patients & neurological diseases like Parkinson's.