The Power of Poop........our future?.........bottom up or nose down.....take your pick

[Countrygirl]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27503660

The brave new world of DIY faecal transplant
By William KremerBBC World Service

Continue reading the main story
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You would have to be desperate to take a sample of your husband's excrement, liquidise it in a kitchen blender and then insert it into your body with an off-the-shelf enema kit. This article contains images and descriptions which some might find shocking.

In April 2012, Catherine Duff was ready to try anything. She was wasting away with crippling abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea so severe she was confined to the house. At 56, in the US state of Indiana, she had come down with her sixth Clostridium difficile infection in six years.

"My colorectal surgeon said: 'The easiest thing would be to just take your colon out.' And my question was: 'Easier for whom?'"

Appalled at the idea of losing her large intestine, Duff's family feverishly searched for alternative treatments on the internet. One of them turned up an article about a doctor in Australia, Thomas Borody, who had been treating C. diff with an unusual process known as faecal transplant, or faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).

Clostridium difficile is an obnoxious microbe, usually kept in check by other bacteria in our guts. Problems arise when antibiotics remove some of these "friendly" bacteria, allowing C. diff to take over. One doctor compares it to the hooligan on the bus who is prevented from doing any harm by the sheer number of people on board. A course of antibiotics is equivalent to some of these people getting off at a stop, allowing the hooligan to run wild. About 50% of a person's faeces is bacteria, and a faecal transplant is like a whole new busload of people - the friendly bacteria - being hustled on board.

Read More Here.

 

[manna]

i think its similar to hiv patients benefitting from blood transfusions. ive heard of an me/cfs patient who got a huge boost from a blood transfusion. personally i think blood is a better way to go but maybe not always as "easy" as poop.

id try fecal implants if i could. i had some bd 500 which is used in one area of organic agriculture. basically organic cow dung stuffed in a cows horn and buried. its kind of alchemical, as above (horn) so below (poop)...and combining heaven and earth. the result was very deep and powerfull. ive also eaten worm castings lol and got a surprising lift from it. apparently native americans were partial to "lifting their spirits" by eating buffalo dung. of course you should be very caarefull when eating animal stools and i recommend no-one try this, thjough i doubt they would anyone heh. also someone chewing your food and imparting their saliva to it and then you swallow that would, imo, be very helpfull. could i do it? doubtfull but seeing as we're talking about such things, heres the place to say anything similar.

 

[Bob]

Shouldn't this be in the 'Other Health News and Research' section? It doesn't mention ME/CFS.

The article focuses on the treatment of C. Difficile, and it also mentions inflammation of the colon, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

And it briefly mentions MS, autism and diabetes in the following section:

Most DIY faecal transplant patients are, in fact, not suffering from C. diff, but from a range of other diseases that they believe the procedure will help, and which doctors are not willing or allowed to treat with faecal transplant. They include conditions that would appear to have very little to do with gut bacteria - including MS, autism, and diabetes - but the most common ailments treated are the inflammatory bowel diseases Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.

 

[Bob]

I'm interested in the idea of a 'synthetic stool', as they call it. (i.e. lab-refined collection of probiotic bacteria, isolated from human faeces, that can be taken in a capsule.)

The BBC article mentions it here:

A different vision of the future of the treatment is a move away from faeces altogether. Instead, patients would receive a live bacterial culture targeted to fight Clostridium difficile - in effect, a synthetic stool.

Although it would be developed from faecal samples, it would only need to contain a handful of strains of bacteria, not the hundreds present in excrement, which would make its impact on the human gut more reproducible and understandable.

Trevor Lawley at the Sanger Institute in the UK is down to just 18 strains in his synthetic stool. He is in the process of overcoming a series of technical problems, such as how to grow these anaerobic organisms and prevent them from evolving before they can be used. But he says the real challenge in the emerging field of "live biotherapeutics" is how to regulate it.

Meanwhile, in Canada Dr Petrof has already cured C. diff in two patients using a synthetic solution containing 33 strains of bacteria grown inside a "robogut"- an imitation colon.

Faecal transplant, she says, works. "But I'll be the first to admit it's crude. It's essentially like pouring sewage into people." Her synthetic stool, on the other hand, smells a lot less obnoxious and is a sterile-looking milky colour.

I looked up the researchers mentioned, and found a list of the 33 strains of bacteria used to create a synthetic stool, by Dr Petrof in Canada, to treat C. Difficile:
http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/1/1/3/table/T1

The table is taken from this paper which describes the successful treatment of two patients (who had C. Difficile) using this 'synthetic stool':
http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/1/1/3

 

[manna]

id be very surprised if the synthetic stools work. reducing it down to beneficial bacteria is an opversimplification imo. nonsense to many but i think the shape of the organs (stomach, small intestine, large intestine) the food has passed through impacts on vitality and action, plus the concentrated bodily secretions and fluids and even the fact the stool was made inside a being that, in my understanding, has a healthy and strong bio-magnetic energy field. in bio-dynamic agriculture, organs herbs etc are stuffed inside animal organs to infuse a certain life force that is carried over to the soil. you need the colon i think. ive heard that synthetic stool has cured one case of c difficile up to now but im not sure i'll accept that as fact. if synthetic stools do work, that'll be great...

other similar ideas, blood transfusions (helps hiv+ and one me/cfs'er i know), bd 500 (bio-dynamic preperartion), worm castings (give you quite a buzz-don't do it though, and the shape of the worm is key in imparting life force), somebody chewing you food for you--yuck but as an idea.

 

[natasa778]

I'm interested in the idea of a 'synthetic stool', as they call it. (i.e. lab-refined collection of probiotic bacteria, isolated from human faeces, that can be taken in a capsule.)

The BBC article mentions it here:

I looked up the researchers mentioned, and found a list of the 33 strains of bacteria used to create a synthetic stool, by Dr Petrof in Canada, to treat C. Difficile:
http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/1/1/3/table/T1

The table is taken from this paper which describes the successful treatment of two patients (who had C. Difficile) using this 'synthetic stool':
http://www.microbiomejournal.com/content/1/1/3

One of the 'inventors' of robogut will be presenting at a UK conference - Brunel University - on 9th November