Thursday, November 15, 2007

postal scrotum: a different sort of enema

The enema of my enema is my friend. Or frenema, if I'm feeling ambivalent.

Imagine using shit to give someone an enema. Think I'm kidding? My buddy Nathan sent me this article about a procedure, being performed in Canada and elsewhere, known variously as "fecal transplant" or "fecal therapy." The idea is rooted in infection control principles: if you want to flush a nasty bacterium like Clostridium difficile out of someone's system, you fire a load of diluted shit into them and flush everything out.

Calgary physician Dr. Tom Louie, head of infection control at Foothills Hospital, is one of the few physicians in Canada who treats patients with chronic C. difficile with fecal transplants, or fecal therapy. He has done 38 procedures to date.

The procedure involves getting a close relative of the patient, such as a sibling, to donate several days-worth of stool. Louie tests the stool for diseases such as hepatitis and HIV and then mixes it with saline to create liquid feces. He then administers the stool to the patient through a barium enema.

Louie said the technique allows good bacteria from the transplanted stool to reduce the number of C. difficile bacteria in the intestines and to restore normal intestinal function.

He said the process is fairly quick.

"It takes me about an hour and I leave it in there overnight. I'm hoping that some of these normal bugs will come and find a home, and when they find a home it will kick out the C. difficile."

There's a lot I could say about this topic... but I'll just pinch things off here.


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3 comments:

Sean said...

I guess it takes the phrase "I couldn't give a shit" to whole new literal meaning.

Anonymous said...

Yanno, I dry heave at the notion of having someone else's liquified scat being piped into me. Woozy I tell ya! WOOZY!!!

Elisson said...

Aw, this sounds like a load of crap.

But, then again, it gives new meaning to the term "take a shit," lifting it out of the idiomatic and into the realm of the literal.

"Truer love hath no man, than that he giveth his brother a Stool to Sit Upon."