Is a fecal transplant right for you?

Sorry. You can’t get one unless you’re at death’s door with a gut colonized by clostridium dificile, a bad bug (bacterium). That’s the only condition under which the FDA authorizes fecal transplants. In case you can’t figure it out, a fecal transplant is the transfer of “stool” from a healthy donor to an unhealthy recipient. In a hospital setting, people with healthy innards are donors.

Of course, you could always do it yourself, as plenty of desperate people do. Case in point: an athletic woman, who is a research scientist, had “bad stomach” issues and chronic fatigue. She had been on a year-long regimen of broad-spectrum antibiotics to combat a serious case of Lyme disease. But the regimen had killed the good bacteria in her colon and, she learned, had allowed the growth of pathogenic bacteria. Because she couldn’t find a doctor who would give her a fecal transplant, she did it herself, using a six dollar enema kit from the drugstore (“not fun,” she says). For a donor, she enlisted a fellow athlete. “Within two months I was a new person,” she reports. “I had no more fatigue. I could ride my bike hard three days in a row, no problem.”

Of course the Web has all kinds of information on do-it-yourself fecal transplants. For example, a Web site called PowerofPoop provides instructions and even helps connect people to potential stool donors. The HBO show, Vice, did a segment on them, which you can watch on You Tube. If you’d like to have your poop analyzed and at the same time contribute to science, go to the American Gut Project Web site. They’re a citizen science project. As their site says, “You get some cool information about the microbes that call your body home while supplying us with priceless data…about the connections between our microbes and our health.” I might do it.

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