It feels a bit wild to think of putting poop into the body instead of letting it out, doesn’t it? You might be interested to learn that the eating of feces by animals, termed “coprophagy,” is common in the animal kingdom, especially rodents. Rats and jack rabbits do not grow as well if they are not allowed to ingest their stool and their microbiomes are less diverse. You can read the science behind these findings here  and here. Feces have a powerful potential to change the flora of the GI tract, sometimes (though not always) for good! Maybe the weird part for you isn’t that the poop is going into the body on purpose, but that it’s someone else’s? Well, the animal kingdom can make us feel a bit better about this idea too. As far back as the 17th century, veterinary medicine has taken advantage of the powerful potential of poop. The transfer of gut microbes, or rumen, from one animal to another, termed transfaunation, has been used to treat diseases in cows, horses, chicks, and sheep. You can watch a video of a transfaunation procedure on an alpaca farm here.

The history of medicine is equally full of examples of triumphs where feces helped cure disease in people. You learned about the 4th century physician Ge Hong during our video, but many other physicians and scientists have followed his lead. For example, you may be interested to browse the book Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke (“Healthy Filth Pharmacy”) written by the 17th century physician Christian Franz Paullini in which he includes multiple recipes that include feces. Have you ever wondered whether you could treat a toothache with horse droppings or poor eyesight with falcon feces? He had an idea. You may also be interested to learn about how soldiers in WWII used camel feces to survive dysentery, or how much people have paid for panda poo tea by reading this article. 

And how about the future of the microbiome in medicine? There is so much potential and so much left to learn. Are you curious about the largest stool bank in the country—OpenBiome? Have you heard of Microsetta, the largest human microbiome decoding project in the world? 

Or, perhaps you are most interested in what is going on in your own body. You can learn more about how to keep your gut microbiome healthy in this TedEd talk about how food affects your gut. There are even commercial companies (for example, Viome, Zoe) that will help send you a snapshot of the makeup of the very microbes that call you their home today. Precision medicine may be the future of medicine. Can you imagine what precision bacteriotherapy might bring?

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