The Washington Post covers fecal bacteriotherapy, a medical procedure that amounts to, basically, a shit transplant.
In the procedure, people whose digestive bacteria have been destroyed by antibiotics or disease drink the extract of diluted turd.
I’m endlessly fascinated by the doctor’s statement that a turd is an “independent organ.”
It is normally considered waste product, but it is in a way an independent organ, like the kidney, and it contains thousands of different bacteria living in symbiosis. These bacteria are needed for normal health. When you use some antibiotics, some of this bacteria population gets destroyed. If you later get infected with Clostridium difficile colitis, there is this competitive battlefield in the colon, and without the necessary bacteria, Clostridium has the upper hand. So what we do is take normal stool from a normal person, make an extract of it, put it in a blender with water, take two tablespoons of that cocktail, and introduce it into the patient’s body.
(via JWZ)