My friend, Dr Michael Gazsi, who is a naturopath, has always recommended avoiding antibiotics. Instead he has his patients take handfuls of probiotics if they get a GI infection like food poisoning . Instead of calling probiotics.poop pills, to try to.avoid giving credit where it belongs, MDs who have made us sick with the.overuse of antibiotics should own up to their mistakes by admiting to needing probiotics ! Read the good news below.
Poop pills are latest way to cure dangerous C. diff infections, new study shows
Swallowing a handful of feces-filled pills might not sound like a medical breakthrough, but for patients like Shawn Mulligan of Calgary, Canada, the unconventional new treatment has been nothing less than a cure. Mulligan, 53, is one of the first people suffering from a terrible gut infection caused by the germ Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, to get better using fecal transplants delivered not through nose tubes, colonoscopies or enemas – but through poop pills. “At first I thought it was kind of nasty, a little gross,” said Mulligan, an engineering technologist who was sick for five months this year with the infection that causes severe diarrhea, cramping and headaches. “But at that point, I would have done anything.”Canadian authors of a new study presented Wednesday at IDWeek 2013, a gathering of infectious disease experts, report the first formal success of fecal transplant pills aimed at treating severe recurrent C. diff infections, which U.S. health officials recently named one of the top three antibiotic-related threats in the nation.Dr. Thomas Louie, an infectious disease expert from the University of Calgary, found a way to package donated stool into vitamin-sized capsules used to repopulate the intestines of C. diff sufferers with beneficial bacteria. Instead of the typical delivery methods, patients gulped two dozen to three dozen gelatin pills filled with feces that had been spun down to the most beneficial microbes. Of the 27 patients treated, none had a recurrence of C. diff, even though all of them had had at least four bouts of the infection, which can lead to severe disease or death. Louie said he has treated a half-dozen more patients since then, with the same result.
Source: MSNBC via