Hi all,,,This is something i heard of recently, an ibs patient is given the feaces of a "healthy" patient to reintroduce healthy bacteria to the colon. Theory being that the cause of the IBS is a bacteria inbalances of some type.....Anyone got any ideas on this, or has anyone undergone this type of procedure? With good results???
Feacal Transplant
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i remember how amazed i was to first read about this procedure on this board but yes apparently it has a good success rate.good luck cazza--hope it works for you and brings relief. http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/07/23...-63241248366763
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It isn't just about putting the feces in (as that is a waste product, you don't need more of it).It is about reseeding the gut with a different set of bacteria. It isn't that easy to separate the bacteria from all the stool and keep them all viable (and some don't live well outside of humans) so what you are trying to do is swap out the colon flora and a lot of those bacteria come out with the stool so it is the easiest place to get a bunch of it.
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Its not really such a strange concept at all. Years ago I recall reading a National Geographic edition concerning elephants which told how the young calfs must eat their mother's, or older elephants, dung in order to obtain the necessary intestinal bacteria to survive. I believe it was also said that there was at least one incident where, when for whatever reason, a calf couldn't get this dung and so aquire the microbes, it wasted away.
The fecal transplant is done under strict conditions. The donor is tested for hiv hep c an a raft of infections.The transplant is done with greater than 95% success in people with cdiff which i had and continue to get symptoms from. It also repopulates the stomach with good flora species. Thousands of patients have undergone this procedure in Aus.
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Up to this point, fecal transplantion has been used to try and repopulate the good bacteria in the gut of people like Cazza who have had a serious bout of C-Diff. It is not yet widely used for other reasons/problems. But, has been found to be beneficial to many of the people with C-Diff who have had the procedure done. The feces are not put into your body, per se. Feces are taken, the good bacteria from the feces is separated out and introduced into the gut via a tube into the gut, if my understanding is correct. We had a discussion about this on the IBD Forum some time ago but I think it got wiped out when the system went down about a year ago. But, you can read an article I wrote about it here: http://www.healthcentral.com/ibd/c/2623/47...gs-worms-answer
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Oh yum! Poop soup, anybody?Wouldn't eating yogurt have a similar effect? In traditional diets fermented foods are a very important and staple food. Most will have some kind of fermented product - yogurt, kefir, kvass, kombucha, sauerkraut, etc. It is only in our Western diet that these foods are largely ignored. Even the Inuit and other cold climate dwellers eat their putrid, fermented fish, etc.In our diet, yogurt is usually consumed as a probiotically 'dead', sweet, sickly, highly processed and often chemicalised fat-devoid dessert which has little or no benefit - and due to the low-fat and high-sugar may actually be damaging.Interestingly, in our area, some of the local hospitals have been giving pre-op patients courses of probiotics to try and give them some protection against hospital-acquired bacterial infections like C. Diff and MRSA.
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From a professional point of view, now that a map of teh gut bacteria has been made, teh fecal transplant has teh potential to be more accurately targetted in teh near future. as it stands at present it is a pretty good way to re seed teh gut, but the long term benifits are hit and miss as you often have to have it done again after 6 months or a year. As i have all but completely cured my self of IBS, GERD, Gastritis from taking specific strain probiotics, i can see teh benifit of this type of thing, especially where Cdiff has been a problem. i changed my diet to extremes and nothing else worked which pointed me in teh direction that not all IBS is related to food, and a food intolerance isnt necessarily IBS. Good luck mate, dont worry about a thing, everything will be iree. cheersIan
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