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Fecal transplant pills outperform antibotics

Imagine you’re a drug developer. Your company makes the best antibiotics in the world.

Now further imagine that you wake up one day and find out you’re in the world where your competitors can literally *slap shit* inside of a pill and out-perform your company’s drugs.

Oh wait — that’s the real world!  #civilizational_inadequacy #lets_try_leeches_again

See on www.sciencedaily.com

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

21 Responses to “Fecal transplant pills outperform antibotics”

  1. December 14

    Chad Groft

    Oh god, they’re not even suppositories? *retch*

  2. December 14

    Daniel Powell

    Is this an example of a general case of how to treat dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Supplant them with bacteria that are less dangerous and/or resistant?

  3. December 14

    Louie Helm

    Just to be clear, I am defying the article’s accuracy on the purification point. They couldn’t have “purified it down to bacteria only”. There are so many problems with that statement.

  4. December 14

    Michael Witbrock

    Apart from needing a medium, I’d bet you can come close enough so that even the most fastidious amongst us wouldn’t mind (that’s probably me, if my mother’s cruel taunts were to be believed)

  5. December 14

    Michael Witbrock

    Hmmm… Well with soil its not pure enough for me: http://aem.asm.org/content/49/6/1482

  6. December 14

    Louie Helm

    So the reason I can know they didn’t do that, is that if they had it down to bacteria only, they could just culture it and do infinite transplants. They can’t do this in practice because researchers haven’t isolated what’s working in it.

    They probably just tell this to people to make them feel better. That said, I do think this is a superior treatment, even if opaquely understood.

  7. December 14

    Ryan Falor

    Regarding Daniel’s comment. The new bacteria out produce/perform the CDiff in the ecology of your gut.
    Regarding Louie’s comment, there are studies on using this kind of therapy to treat a wide range of issues including auto-immune conditions, psychological disorders, and even obesity. Increasingly the science suggests you ARE your biome.

  8. December 14

    Chris Hallquist

    It’s hilarious that people would be less scared to eat “purified bacteria” than, well… plain old shit. It’s the bacteria that makes shit bad for you to eat. I assume they’re screening it for cholera and stuff like that… but then, you could do that without “purifying” it.

  9. December 14

    Louie Helm

    I remember seeing brief research papers on obesity for this. Has anyone gotten a study up over 2-3 people for this yet?

    • December 15

      Anywolf

      The obesity issue hasn’t come under FDA approval yet. They have approved use with Crohns Disease, where it has essentially shown to be 100% effective. (Obviously still a limited sample size–once they get into the 100’s of patients, you can’t help but screw up in choice of patient, correct bacterial mixture, actual cause not matching the treatment, etc.)

  10. December 14

    Chris Hallquist

    Nitpicking the article: “Human beings are 90 percent bacteria.”

    Seems a bit misleading. By cell type, yes, but not by mass/volume, since eukaryotic cells are so much larger than prokaryotic cells.

    • December 15

      Anywolf

      The statistic is based on cell numbers and/or genomic information, yes. They leave that out as a part of the dumbing down of America.

  11. December 14

    Louie Helm

    In practice, you get what the doctor knows how to do. Almost all of these have been done via nose tubes. I’ve never heard of a patient having a say in the matter.

  12. December 14

    Chris Hallquist

    Daniel Powell: Yeah, but when you go ahead and *tell me* it’s a feces pill… I mean, if no one had ever presented it to me that way, and it had been presented under some fancy name, I’d be OK with it. In fact, if this becomes widespread, it will have a fancy name and not “feces pill.” But thanks to Louie, I’ll have the “feces pill” label in my head…

  13. December 14

    Daniel Powell

    … I’ll recognize it intellectually as such, but I’m not sure that the part of my brain that does disgust will be able to interpret it that way.

    Particularly if I choose not to think on it too much. I’m far more squeamish about the alternative methods of administering the shit than I am about swallowing a gelatin capsule, especially if the gelatin can be made some color other than brown.

  14. December 14

    Duff McDuffee

    Eat shit and…live?

  15. December 14

    Eliezer Yudkowsky

    Welcome to 2014. Our new advanced medical treatment is putting shit up your nose.

  16. December 15

    Robin Lee Powell

    I had to read the comments to realize (I think) that your point was not “don’t let someone make you eat shit, that’s terrible!” but rather “WTH are we paying drug companies for if treatments like this can outperform them?”. Did I get that right?

  17. December 15

    Robin Lee Powell

    On a related note, it is fascinating what people can and can’t get over; RA has *very* sensitive celiac, to the point where we have to wash our children after *they* eat gluten so *she* doesn’t get sick, and has indicated that she wouldn’t do helminthic therapy even if it was certain to work, because she can’t get over it as being equivalent to swallowing worms. (I have indicated that given the impact on our lives, I wasn’t really planning on giving her a choice, but as it has a very poor track record so far with celiac specifically, it hasn’t been an issue yet 🙂

  18. December 15

    Louie Helm

    I’m mostly sad that medicine barely exists. And then meta-sad that people capable of developing medicine don’t exist.

  19. December 15

    Eliezer Yudkowsky

    Medicine exists. Medical epistemology does not exist.