When you visit the bathroom, what goes into the toilet isn't meant to come back out. It's meant to be flushed, right? Not necessarily. Thanks to emerging and promising scientific studies, your poop may soon be a prescription! Fecal transplants are exactly what they sound like. They take poop from a healthy person and place it inside a recipient with a diseased gut.
There is talk about stool banks in the near future, just as we have blood banks!
Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) is not new. The first successful FMT was done in 1958. Until now, however, it hadn't been widely discussed in the mainstream medical community. Recently, this formerly-taboo procedure has caught the attention of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They are now conducting studies so it can be approved as a common medical therapy. It was designated as an investigational new drug (IND) for treatment of disease, including Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections, by the FDA in May, 2013.*
If you can get past the "ick" factor, fecal transplants have been one of the most successful therapies for those with C. diff infection. It has also been used with much success in the treatment of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
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