um. the image. ew.

[derien]

Doing a severe hack job on the first few paragraphs of this article to show the high points:
... patient ... was crippled by constant diarrhea, ... Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. ... 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. ... her diarrhea vanished in a day.

from the next page of the article:
The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight.

So, it'll never get to be a weight loss fad because people will find the thought too disgusting, but it would probably work. "Gosh, you're thin. Could you just give me a stool sample? I'm going to make an enema of it." ew. ew ew ew. I do hope they can isolate some of these microbes in a good probiotic pill, though! :)

Comments

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

That's strange. I always thought your gut flora changed, died, flourished etc. due to what you were eating, stress levels, taking medicines containing hormones etc. I didn't think that it could stay "out of whack" for eight months (unless of course you were taking antibiotics for those months), and find it even odder that introducing a small amount of "good" bacteria would just fix it. Odd. But I don't now much about it. Maybe there's something in it. Poo, that is...

[derien.livejournal.com]

There's something in this crock of shit. Bacteria. ;)