Transplant what?

On the day after my four-month SCD anniversary, I thought I'd share some news on the latest possible treatment for IBS that's getting a lot of buzz these days.

It's known by several names.  Fecal Bacteriotherapy.  Fecal Microbiota Therapy.  Stool transplant.  Yep, you read right, stool transplant: you take someone else's poop and transplant it into your colon.

Although it might sound absurd at first, once you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: there's a very diverse little village of bacteria in your gut, and if some parts of the population overgrow and others are suppressed or removed altogether, the entire system can start malfunctioning.  Badly.  But if you repopulate the village with a bunch of happy bacteria from the well-functioning village down the road, everything starts working properly again.

So how is this accomplished?  Well, it's been done in a few doctor's offices as a treatment for stubborn c. diff. infections.  But because it's still a fairly new procedure and hasn't received FDA approval, it's more commonly done as a DIY project.  You get a blender, some poop from a sympathetic donor, a turkey baster, and... well, you get the picture.  There are several threads going right now in the forums at http://www.ibsgroup.org that were started by people who decided to give it a try; a couple appear to be unqualified successes for people who have suffered from IBS for years.

Recently, a doctor in Canada came up with a way to extract the bacteria from someone's poop and pack them into pills that can be swallowed, rather than having to insert them via the other end of the pipe.  The whole process is described in this article.  It's not much different than taking any of the bazillion commercial probiotics that are out there, these capsules simply contain a much more diverse population of bacteria.

Both approaches -- the procedure done by a doctor and pills created for a specific patient -- have given a lot of people some new hope.  It may be somewhat gross to think about, but most people who suffer from serious IBS symptoms for years or decades would be willing to try just about anything.  Unfortunately, regulatory approval takes a long time, so it's unlikely that either approach is going to be widespread anytime soon.  But there's always the DIY approach.

And what do I think about it?  Since the Specific Carbohydrate Diet has helped me a lot so far, I'm going to continue on this path for the time being.  My biggest concern isn't the "gross factor," it's the lack of data about which bacterial families/strains are necessary for proper gut function, and in what ratio.  And which of those families/strains I'm low on, or are missing from my gut completely.  I mean, if the bacteria that I'm missing are the members of the community who are in the book club, and my donor happens to have an overabundance of bacteria that belong to a motorcycle gang, well... I just don't want to accidentally make things worse, that's all.

But it will definitely be in the back of my mind as an option down the road.