You may have heard of a gross but highly effective technique for treating certain gut problems—namely Clostridium difficile infection, a common cause of chronic diarrhea and stomach upset in people older than 65, people who have been on antibiotics for a long time and people whose immune systems are down, such as cancer patients. The treatment, called fecal transplantation, involves taking purified feces from a healthy person and putting it into a sick one.

Known to Chinese medicine and other non-Western forms of healing for thousands of years, fecal transplant took the medical community by storm when Western doctors realized that it really worked—and so much better than pharma drugs. The cure rate for chronic C. difficile infection treated with fecal transplant is about 90%. In fact, doctors were so impressed with the success of fecal transplants that they negotiated, in full force, with the FDA when the FDA threatened to put tight restrictions on when and how the procedure could be performed.

STREAMLINING FECAL TRANSPLANTS

The point of fecal transplants is to transfer healthful gut bacteria (found in healthy human feces) from one person into another so that these bacteria can populate that other person’s gut and edge out the microbes and chemical reactions that are causing disease, explained Eamonn Quigley, MBBS, MD, an expert in fecal transplant and chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at The Methodist Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College in Houston. In ancient China—brace yourself—transplants were performed by feeding a person “poop soup.” Nowadays, fecal transplants are performed via enema or by inserting a tube into the colon or the stomach through the nose. But there’s got to be a better way—and that way is soon to debut—a way most Americans are, ironically, used to when it comes to treating infections. A pill. But not a pill loaded with synthetic drugs. This pill contains frozen or freeze-dried human feces.

Scientists have been experimenting with this treatment since 2013 and, most recently, a research team from the Massachusetts General Hospital proved that fecal transplant pills work as well as the more invasive methods just mentioned. The team recruited 20 patients with chronic C. difficile infections and gave them pills containing freeze-dried stool (screened for safety) donated by volunteers. Each patient took 15 capsules a day for two days. And even though that still sounds gross, the treatment worked like a charm. Diarrhea stopped and did not return in 14 of the 20 patients (70%). The six patients who still had symptoms got another two-day treatment a week later, and five were cured (although C. difficile symptoms recurred after a few weeks in one of the five who responded to the second treatment). That means that the fecal pill was 90% successful. These folks would otherwise have been treated with heavy-duty and expensive antibiotics, such as vancomycin and metronidazole—antibiotics that can have side effects and often don’t work anyway.

WHO NEEDS IT?

Do a search of fecal transplants on the Web and you will learn that some people are advocating at-home, do-it-yourself fecal transplants. But do-it-yourself jobs are risky…instead of curing an infection, you could give yourself one from parasites and bad bacteria lurking in your donor’s feces, or you could infect or injure yourself from homespun methods of getting the feces into yourself, said Dr. Quigley. As for medically done procedures, no cases of serious side effects have been reported.

Although fecal transplant might be useful for other gut infections and even chronic illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, it is now approved only to treat C. difficile infections. The pill form of fecal transplant continues to be studied and isn’t yet officially ready for prime time, but the odds seem very good that the pill method will soon be approved, given the dramatic results of the latest study.

If you have C. difficile infection and have been bombarding your body with antibiotics for it because the infection keeps coming back, visit a gastroenterologist and ask about fecal transplant or visit The Fecal Transplant Foundation for gastroenterologists in your area who offer the treatment.