This Company Wants To Put A Stranger’s Poop In Your Body – For Your Health
Insert your own “crap business model” joke here.
In case you weren’t aware of it, or just distracted by other, fancier body-swaps like face transplants, there is actually such a thing as a fecal transplant. That’s when, in order to replace the necessary bacteria in the gut (which can be wiped out as a side effect of, say, the strong course of antibiotics you were prescribed for that thing you caught off that girl in Cancun), they literally insert a complete stranger’s poop into your body, squeezing it into your body via colonoscopy. It’s hard to imagine something more disgusting than that, but it really is the best option when the alternative is a nasty, intestine-damaging infection called Clostridium difficile, which thrives in gut flora-free bowels.
The question, of course, is where to get the poop? Sure, it’s not exactly a finite resource, but you don’t want just any old poop shoved into your belly, do you? That’s where OpenBiome comes in. A non-profit company, they have recently been supplying hospitals with screened, medically safe poop from just three trusted donors, and by all accounts, the results have been excellent, with no adverse side effects recorded. You can read more about them in this revoltingly thorough Gizmodo article, but for the time being, rest assured that if you ever really, really need someone else’s poo shoved into your body, these guys have got you covered. In poo.
Photos by Getty Images | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2014
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