- Fecal microbiota transplantation—the medical euphemism for taking poop from a healthy person, blending it up, and putting it in a sick person’s intestines—has shown extraordinary promise in treating C. difficile infections. There’s also some suggestion it could help treat other painful chronic conditions, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
In 2013, the FDA announced that it would have to regulate the transplanted fecal microbiome as a drug. When stool is used to treat disease, the agency explained, it falls within the broad statutory definition of a “drug.” But Sachs and Edelstein have mixed feelings about FDA regulation.
“Not only does stool defy the typical scientific characterization that the FDA has long applied to small-molecule and biologic drugs, but the potential do-it-yourself nature of the treatment poses particular concerns in the context of a regime involving periods of regulatory exclusivity.”
From the paper:
- Protocols for encapsulating stool have also been validated and published.
- In the first clinical trial evaluating the therapy, FMT proved so superior to standard antibiotics that the study’s data and safety monitoring board stopped enrollment early, concluding that it was unethical to withhold the treatment from the members of the control group.
And a mention of “OpenBiome, a public stool bank” which pays donors in Massachusetts up to $250 a week for "samples"!
"Earn prizes!" ("biggest single donation of the month" — not making this up) "Free drinks!"
In Praise of Extreme Medicine "Poop from an unscreened stranger could carry serious infections, like hepatitis or gonorrhea, or dormant viruses." No doubt–this is why we also ban sex and french kissing. I suspect that many of the so-called treatments are crazy but people do a lot of crazy things. It’s odd that we allow some crazy things and ban others—even more that the crazy things we allow are sometimes socially useless while the crazy things that we ban are sometimes socially valuable. The case for banning extreme sports, for example, is much stronger than the case for banning extreme medicine. Extreme sports don’t provide much benefit to the rest of humanity, other than some entertainment of questionable social value. Extreme medicine, on the other hand, has the potential to improve all our lives and at the very least is a useful warning about what not to do. Yet, extreme sports are lauded, or at least treated as mostly your own business (we do put some regulations on boxing and race car driving), while extreme medicine is heavily regulated and socially frowned upon.A rogue clinic in Tampa, however, provides the carefully sourced material and explains to patients how the procedure is done. Since the procedure is simple, lots of experimentation is going on which upsets some people.
The claims therein are more believable than a recently published Nature article, so I think there's definitely some validity. Moral of the story: you should just try to poop wherever geniuses and healthy folks poop. Eventually we might quantify the amount of "shitheadedness" we all actually have. Not only microbiome mental influence, but "bodily health" systems as well (and probably first/more easily).