Fecal transplant

Ingesting urine crazy? So what about “literally eating poop”.

The practices just mentioned are not crazy at all, but rather they are ancestral traditional practices of what is known as Excremental Medicine.

Excremental Medicine is part of traditional medicine and involves the ingestion of human or animal excrement and organic waste for medicinal purposes.

Specifically, the ingestion of human feces has gone from being considered as pure madness and superstition to respected therapeutic treatment adopted as a legitimate part of conventional medicine. The scientific terminology seems to sound good, and thus the procedure, after being verified and experimented, is today sanctioned and blessed with the denomination of “fecal transplant”, a term and procedure that is becoming better known.

So here is a story and topic fit for this blog.

You would have to be desperate to be willing to take a sample of your husband’s excrement, liquidize it in a blender and then insert it into your body with an enema kit.

In April 2012, Catherine Duff was determined to try anything. She was consumed by terrible abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, being forced to remain confined at home. And this as a consequence of being infected by clostridium difficile, a bacterium generally controlled by other “friendly bacteria” in the intestine.

The problem appeared following treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics, when the normal bacterial flora was altered. Bacterial flora which had been able to keep Clostridium difficile under control.

With the “friendly bacteria” eliminated, clostridium was able to take control over the large intestine, causing diarrhea (due to the toxins it generates), abdominal pain, inflammation and even life-threatening sepsis.

Catherine’s surgeon said:

“The easiest thing would be to just take your colon out.”

But Catherine‘s question was: “Easier for whom?”

Both the surgeon and Catherine’s family were unaware of the existence of the “fecal transplant” therapy, which could save both her colon and life.

Appalled at the idea of losing her large intestine, Duff’s family feverishly searched for alternative treatments on the internet. At last they came across a clinic in Australia where they were treating Clostridium difficile with an unusual process: “fecal transplant”. In this clinic a total cure of the disease was achieved in 90 percent of the cases.

Despite the fact that neither spouse had special health training, given the urgency of the case, got down to work strictly following the distant instructions from the Australian clinic. The husband provided his own feces, which he inserted into his wife’s rectum with an enema kit.

The process began one day at 4 in the afternoon. Later, on that same day, at 10pm, Catherine felt completely cured! The day before she had been on the brink of kidney failure and literally feeling as if she was going to die.

Many people in the world die from Clostridium difficile when bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotic treatment and intestinal flora is disturbed.

Fecal transplants cure up to 90 percent of patients with recurrent clostridium difficile infections. Conventional medicine around the world has adopted fecal transplant therapy as a legitimate medical treatment.

To conclude, let’s say that Dr. Kelly, from Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the leading specialists in fecal transplants, successfully performed over 300 transplants in less than 10 years. Dr. Kelly has seen with satisfaction that patients with the most severe form of clostridium difficile infection get up and ask to have something to eat just one day following transplantation.

It must be remembered that fecal transplant therapy, recently incorporated into conventional medicine, derives directly from the corresponding ancestral traditional practice.

WHO Strategy on Traditional Medicine 2014-2023

“Traditional medicine is an important and often underestimated part of health services. In some countries, traditional medicine or non-conventional medicine is often called complementary medicine. Historically, traditional medicine has been used to maintain health, and to prevent and treat diseases, particularly chronic diseases”.