Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist, saved a patient by transplanting a piece of her husband's excrement into her colon:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The microbes in the man's excrement replaced those absent in the patient:
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Link via The Agitator | Photo (unrelated) from Flickr user pnoeric used under Creative Commons license
I've read about this before and it really makes you stop and consider, maybe we evolved just to be meat vessels for all the bacteria and microbes we carry around inside us.
So it was just done for shits and grins?
It's called mutualism.
))((
back and forth... forever.
1) "ugh, I have Clostridium difficle"
2) "let's not pay a doctor"
3) "I bought this clear vinyl tube.."
4) etc.
"How Can Doctors Use Poop to Save a Life?"
http://www.spike.com/video/how-can-doctors-use/3025861