Latest / Privycast / Ep. 166 Fecal Transplants

Transcript

Ep. 166 Fecal Transplants · Privycast

• 0:01
  How do you make medicine out of a ghost?
• 0:04
  Like at least, you know, the poop I can see the slurry, you know?
• 0:09
  How do you get a ghost in your Tylenol pill?
• 0:18
  Welcome back to privy privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded From my home bathroom.
• 0:28
  I'm your host hunter Hoover and I love bathrooms Welcome back everyone.
• 0:33
  Thank you so much for being here.
• 0:35
  Thank you for joining us in bathroom for record once again here on the show we've Over the course of the shows You know
• 0:47
  five years now, we're five years in.
• 0:50
  We've talked a lot about some pretty crazy sounding medical remedies and people have done some wild stuff with the stuff that comes out of their bodies.
• 1:03
  We've used urine for toothpaste, we've peed on open wounds, we've read cat poop in our eyes and that's really just the start.
• 1:14
  Like
• 1:15
  That's not even to get into the dark side of like them diagnosing people's medical conditions based off the quote unquote flavor of their urine.
• 1:26
  Dear Lord, we've strayed far.
• 1:29
  Don't get me started on early pregnancy tests.
• 1:32
  A yoink.
• 1:33
  How's the breast smell?
• 1:36
  There have been a lot of wild first aid and medical remedies and medical treatments that we've looked at in the history of this show.
• 1:45
  But what if I told you that one treatment, one medical remedy, one treatment sought to remedy your problem?
• 2:00
  by introducing poop from outside of your body into your body.
• 2:09
  No, on the surface this sounds fully randy.
• 2:14
  But today on Privy we're going to talk about fecal microbiota transplants or as they're colloquially named fecal transplants and figure out why did we start doing this.
• 2:36
  And why, maybe more importantly, have we never stopped doing it?
• 2:47
  I'm going be honest with you, at the outset of this episode, it's hard to tell when some of these medical practices started and when we just started to write about them and record
• 3:01
  their use throughout history.
• 3:05
  That was crisp.
• 3:08
  Yeah.
• 3:10
  The YouTube viewer with the keen eye will note.
• 3:13
  Though...
• 3:14
  The can deceptively looks like orange vanilla.
• 3:18
  This is Polar Seltzer's new flavor, Georgia Peach.
• 3:22
  Now, I'm not sponsored by Polar Seltzer.
• 3:25
  I'm not trying to get Polar Seltzer to like send me a free case of Seltzer.
• 3:30
  But if I was, it would be the coconut one that I cannot find anywhere here in Albany, Oregon.
• 3:38
  But the Georgia Peach,
• 3:42
  is vying for first place in the polar seltzer lineup.
• 3:46
  It's very delicious.
• 3:48
  But like I said, I'm going be honest with you, it's hard to tell sometimes with these medical treatments when the practice has started and differentiating that from like when
• 4:00
  we just began to write about it as a people.
• 4:03
  And as I researched this, I've got multiple times and multiple times throughout the researching process.
• 4:13
  I found a source and you can check out all my sources right now.
• 4:21
  But I found this source that says the history of these poop transplants dates back to about 1000 BC in China.
• 4:30
  But the problem is this.
• 4:33
  Usually what happens when I get a date, this is a peek behind the Who V.
• 4:36
  Hunties research corner.
• 4:40
  When I read that and it's like, 1000 BC China, I type in 1000 BC China fecal transplant.
• 4:46
  I go on the internet search rabbit hole.
• 4:49
  The problem is, when I try to dig deeper, specifically on how ancient Chinese physicians, people, whoever used this fecal transplant, I'm brought back to the same study, or rather,
• 5:08
  the same reference made by a doctor named Yung Shen Yong, who claims in his research paper online,
• 5:18
  that these practices have their ties to an old ancient Chinese medical practice called, quote, making yellow soup.
• 5:26
  Now, brother same, first of all, like, me too, yellow soup happens sometimes, brother.
• 5:33
  Usually it seems to be one and one coinciding with chili season, but I digress.
• 5:39
  I've made some yellow soups in my day.
• 5:42
  Just fully zoinked it.
• 5:47
  But I used to call these septic Saturdays, these yellow soup days, because I go to Applebee's and I get wingies on fri- ooh, I might be in for it.
• 5:58
  I had Applebee's tonight, at the night of this record, I had Applebee's.
• 6:02
  My wife is out of town.
• 6:04
  I got Applebee's with the fam, because my wife is not a fan of the Applebee's.
• 6:10
  And so I might be in for a septic Sunday tomorrow.
• 6:13
  That could be wild.
• 6:14
  I gotta work.
• 6:16
  A church.
• 6:18
  You don't want to septic yourself in the middle of church.
• 6:20
  That is no good.
• 6:21
  But it's a tough look.
• 6:24
  But according to Yang or Yang or whatever, Himchong boom, this quote yellow soup was used in a number of dietary and in order to treat a number of anti-inflammatory illness.
• 6:39
  Like it was was to help with these things.
• 6:42
  Now, in his research paper.
• 6:45
  According to Yang, this yellow soup was used to do these things.
• 6:51
  But here's the trouble.
• 6:53
  I'm not saying that Mr.
• 6:55
  Yang got it twisted.
• 6:57
  He's a doctor and I'm not.
• 6:59
  But he's like a doctor seemingly for the tum tum.
• 7:05
  So I'm sure he knows how to do research and stuff.
• 7:07
  But like, I'm just saying that when I go into his paper and I go down into the thingies, I try to find like
• 7:15
  what he's reading to be able to say that.
• 7:18
  I'm just saying with that stat that the earliest use of fecal transplant being the 10th century BC China, I can only trace that stat, that piece of research back to him.
• 7:34
  Now, I'm sure there's some library or book or something out there that's got the golden goose of
• 7:42
  fecal transplant information to prove what I just said wrong.
• 7:47
  until that person A.
• 7:50
  Finds that information and B.
• 7:52
  Finds this show and C.
• 7:54
  Gets the gumption to email me privycast at gmail.com saying that I got it wrong and setting me straight open call for somebody to set me straight.
• 8:04
  I'm here to tell you I can't find anything beyond the fact that Mr.
• 8:09
  Yang wrote about it to suggest that this happened.
• 8:12
  The buck stops with Mr.
• 8:13
  Yang claiming that this practice came from 1000 BC China.
• 8:18
  Now I'm not saying it didn't.
• 8:21
  I've got no skin in the Chinese medicine game.
• 8:25
  And I'm not saying that Yang didn't find that research.
• 8:29
  I'm just saying in my quest to get into the bottom of this, to wipe the bottom clean if you will, I found a loop of poop.
• 8:37
  A poopy loop.
• 8:38
  Poop loops.
• 8:40
  Okay.
• 8:41
  April Fool's idea for the Kellogg's company.
• 8:45
  You release a chocolate freight flavored fruit loop called poop loops.
• 8:52
  Kellogg, the timestamp is now April 12th, 2025.
• 8:58
  If ever this product, Chocolate Flavored Fruit Loops comes out.
• 9:06
  I know I can't be the first person to have this thought.
• 9:08
  It's also like not fruitless, but it's poop loops.
• 9:11
  Anyway, I'm not saying it didn't, but I found a loop where a lot of people are just saying like, yeah, it dates back to like a thousand BC China.
• 9:24
  And every single time that that happens, they quote Mr.
• 9:29
  Yang's research.
• 9:30
  And then when I go dig into Mr.
• 9:32
  Yang's research,
• 9:33
  I can't find where he got his information about that.
• 9:38
  And I'm wondering if it's a closed circle of fecal transplant information.
• 9:49
  So here we are.
• 9:51
  What I can find, is research and information dating to the ballpark of about the fourth century.
• 10:09
  Yi Hong was a Chinese linguist, philosopher, doctor, politician, and writer.
• 10:17
  Specialization was not really their strong suit back then.
• 10:21
  He's part of the Eastern Jin dynasty, which in Chinese history, all the dynasties feel a bit ambiguous.
• 10:28
  Like, I can't keep it straight.
• 10:30
  And they all overlap oddly, and I just get so lost on the Chinese dynasties.
• 10:37
  Sorry China.
• 10:38
  I'm sure your dynasties are cool to learn about, but it's too much for me.
• 10:43
  But Guihong in the Jin dynasty, Eastern Jin dynasty, is credited with being the first person who first began the use of what would be deemed like first aid in Chinese medicine.
• 10:58
  This is like emergency aid.
• 11:02
  One characteristic of Guihong was the...
• 11:06
  he began to pursue Taoist teachings and of these he was particularly interested in the elixirs which were believed to achieve some spiritual freedom and a Taoist immorality.
• 11:21
  He spent his time in the army refining these elixirs through work in herbal medicine.
• 11:29
  In this regard, has also seen dabbling in the world of alchemy.
• 11:34
  And we know those piss prophets were dabbling in alchemy.
• 11:37
  We learned about them last Halloween season, Spoopkey season.
• 11:42
  But much of his findings were published in a work called Emergency Formula at Elbow's Length.
• 11:49
  In this, one of the most influential findings
• 11:54
  he conducted was working in the treatment of malaria, which later led to the discovery and use of artemisinin and is credited in part of the Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine related
• 12:09
  to the treatment and use of malaria treatments.
• 12:15
  So Gi-hong and his research in this emergency formula, Elbow's Length, had
• 12:21
  research and medical information that proved beneficial for the treatment of malaria today.
• 12:30
  One of these treatments in his book, his compendium, was a classification of treatments called human medicine.
• 12:43
  One such remedy listed under human medicine was a solution for food poisoning and diarrhea.
• 12:53
  And it could be purportedly found in the Handbook of Emergency Medicine, penned
• 12:59
  by our friend, Gi Hong.
• 13:01
  Now I'm not going to admit, I can't find this book.
• 13:03
  I tried to find a translated copy, found plenty of articles referencing it, and we're back on the Yang problem.
• 13:12
  But yes, all of these note that after about 1200 years after Gi Hong, another Chinese scientist,
• 13:24
  this one operating more outside the world of acupuncture, herbalism, and pharmacology, Li Xijin is our next stop on our journey to understanding and learning more about fecal
• 13:35
  transplants.
• 13:37
  Now, writing in about the, you know, the 17, 1800s, Li Xijin is most well known for his writing in the Compendium of Materia Medica.
• 13:50
  In it, he compiled much of the medical knowledge of the world, as well as edited and gave note and debunked incorrect remedies.
• 14:00
  This compendium took him 27 years to create.
• 14:07
  It's huge.
• 14:09
  It's massive.
• 14:10
  It is a lifelong work.
• 14:16
  the materioc medicare or the bunk bunk up been cow Gong Mu as is called a gathering of encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese medicine and herbology if you want to know about Chinese
• 14:29
  medicine it's in this book and listen you can get a you can get an English translation of this book it's huge there's like five volumes some of which of those volumes are so big
• 14:42
  that they split them
• 14:44
  But inside this compendium of Chinese medicine, there is purportedly a remedy for diarrhea.
• 14:54
  and upset stomachs called yellow soup.
• 15:00
  whether this can be credited back to Mr.
• 15:03
  or not, and maybe this is where Yang, maybe this is Yang's source, but...
• 15:11
  This yellow soup or golden syrup was typically made using fecal matter.
• 15:22
  Poo syrup.
• 15:24
  Winnie the Pooh.
• 15:26
  that gives a whole new twist to Winnie the Pooh's honey.
• 15:29
  You know what saying?
• 15:31
  get some of that poo honey.
• 15:33
  poo honey.
• 15:37
  just wrong.
• 15:38
  It's poo my friends.
• 15:40
  Fecal is poo.
• 15:42
  It's poo and you add a little bit of water and some other leaves and stuff.
• 15:47
  You mix it up and you take it just like you would take any soup or any syrup.
• 15:55
  down the hatch.
• 16:00
  I'm sorry.
• 16:02
  But I want to note, this is, I have to be honest.
• 16:09
  I have to tell the truth.
• 16:11
  This is not a reflection on the flavor of this thing.
• 16:14
  It is a reflection on simply the description of this medical treatment and the appearance of something else.
• 16:21
  But at Thanksgiving there is served a squash or a pumpkin soup.
• 16:28
  And it is yellow in nature.
• 16:30
  And when I think of yellow soup, that is the thing that I think of.
• 16:35
  And now I'm gonna have this stupid thought about this weirdo Chinaman making stank, stank syrup and giving it to people to help their tummies.
• 16:47
  There are reports that this yellow soup or golden syrup maybe even quote, brought people back from the brink of death.
• 16:59
  And here's my problem.
• 17:01
  At this point, this remedy made its way around for so long and Li Xijin didn't edit it out when he found it.
• 17:09
  And I think you have to have a pretty bad stomach ache.
• 17:13
  Like I think things have to go pretty poorly for you.
• 17:17
  Like things have to be going pretty sideways in the tummy zone to ingest someone else's poo slurry to help fix it.
• 17:29
  It is the most counterintuitive thing.
• 17:31
  Like, my stomach, I've had some stomach aches in my life.
• 17:36
  When I was a lad, I was an anxious fellow.
• 17:40
  Still am.
• 17:42
  But I had stomach aches all the time.
• 17:44
  I got sick a lot.
• 17:47
  Never once in the middle of one of these bad stomach aches did I ever think, you know, maybe if I mix my poo with water and other substances and eat it,
• 17:58
  or drink it.
• 17:59
  It'll help me.
• 18:03
  In his text, Li Shijin gives a number of prescriptions for human ailment.
• 18:10
  And in these descriptions for human ailment, the third most popular ingredient to these remedies is human poop.
• 18:23
  Yup.
• 18:27
  Why?
• 18:27
  Human poop.
• 18:28
  I'd argue the second most used ingredient because the second most is just it.
• 18:35
  So I would argue the human poop is the second most used ingredient because Li Shijin says that really the second most used ingredient, the third being human poop.
• 18:44
  But in his list, a ghost, a ghost is the second most used.
• 18:51
  But like, how do you make medicine out of a ghost?
• 18:57
  Like at least, you know, the poop, I can see the slurry, you know.
• 19:02
  How do you get a ghost in your Tylenol pill?
• 19:05
  There's ghosts in the pills, And so I would argue it's the second most used ingredient, human poop.
• 19:18
  And I'll know a lot of times these remedies are related to like Chinese spiritualism and Confucianism and Taoist medicine and that's fine.
• 19:27
  But again, I'm not convinced that I can get someone's gg ghost in my cough syrup.
• 19:33
  I'm just not I don't think that's a thing that I'm going to be able to accomplish and so They're not just running around mixing fluids with whatever they could get their hands on
• 19:43
  Lee writes in one of his volumes that a person must
• 19:47
  Be careful how they proceed in these things because the human person is different and do respect and that many of the remedies put forth in the manual should actually not be used.
• 19:59
  So that's fine.
• 20:01
  It seems like the whole drinking poo smoothie was not one of the forbidden remedies though.
• 20:09
  Like Li Shijun acknowledges, hey, there's a few things in this book that we ought not dabble with.
• 20:14
  and the human person is valuable and they're different.
• 20:18
  And then he proceeds to be like, but listen, drinking human turd slushie, A-okay, it's gonna help settle things.
• 20:30
  And again, the mystery in all this to me is the things continue to state that this is a remedy.
• 20:39
  And what I mean by that is this.
• 20:42
  That means that somebody is verifying that information.
• 20:45
  That means someone is going out there and is supping diarrhea slush to verify that it has helped them in some way.
• 20:55
  Dear God, help us.
• 20:58
  It's plumb wild.
• 21:00
  it's too much.
• 21:02
  The data on fecal transplants kind of like goes like this.
• 21:07
  A lot of ancient Chinese dudes talked about it and there was this yellow soup and golden syrup
• 21:17
  and then it's radio sound.
• 21:20
  and it's radio silent for a few hundred years until the 1950s.
• 21:34
  I to note, I tried to find some mention of the use of fecal transplants over the course of that long stretch of silent history written around the matter, and there isn't much
• 21:46
  mention of it.
• 21:47
  And I don't get it.
• 21:51
  And I think there's like a bit of taboo here, but I also don't understand because like we have the Egyptians rubbing cat poo on their eyes.
• 22:01
  And nothing in the way of fecal transplants for nearly a thousand years.
• 22:07
  It's wild.
• 22:09
  But I think it is due to the very taboo nature of this stuff.
• 22:14
  Like drinking human poo is pretty buck wild.
• 22:19
  And I imagine that there was a lot of people that both heard about and scoffed at this remedy and said, mm, I'm gonna skip that one.
• 22:27
  Like, I'm not gonna write that.
• 22:28
  It's pretty gross.
• 22:29
  Like you have to be very, very sick and very desperate to get to a point where it is a solution.
• 22:37
  it's a solution.
• 22:37
  All right.
• 22:38
  It's a pollution.
• 22:40
  Pollution.
• 22:41
  who looted, you know,
• 22:47
  But as I noted, the next time that discussions about fecal transplants pop up was in 1958 when the first use of a fecal medical treatment or FMT was used and the findings were
• 23:01
  published by Dr.
• 23:02
  Ben Eisman, a surgeon in Denver, Colorado.
• 23:07
  Dr.
• 23:07
  Ben Eisman used the fecal medical treatment to successfully treat a life-threatening pseudo
• 23:15
  Membranous colitis, which is known to be caused by Clostridiodif… C.
• 23:26
  diff.
• 23:28
  The biggest difference though, if you hear that and think some doctor in the 1950s was serving up Duke smoothies, no.
• 23:37
  Naturally, he shot the poop smoothie up their butt.
• 23:43
  But why?
• 23:45
  Get it?
• 23:45
  Like but with two T's why?
• 23:47
  It's a word joke.
• 23:51
  The science is essentially this.
• 23:54
  If you take antibiotics for those bacteria and infections in the colon and intestines, you are going to kill the good bacteria your body needs.
• 24:06
  However, if you introduce a new
• 24:10
  healthier batch of that good bacteria to the mix, it's gonna help you regulate things.
• 24:17
  This is probably as good of time as any to tell you and to remind you that I am NOT a doctor.
• 24:26
  But a doctor in the 1950s in Denver, Colorado gave a patient with C.
• 24:33
  diff a stank enema.
• 24:36
  Just power hosed the world's sloppiest juice up their bee.
• 24:43
  And the thing is, is it worked.
• 24:50
  treated these people with human diarrhea latte.
• 24:54
  They provided this treatment with measured success for years at their location in Denver.
• 25:01
  Thirty years later in the 1980s, they began to use these messages for treating ulcerative colitis.
• 25:09
  The following year, they treated a total of 55 patients with constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn's disease.
• 25:19
  And as we moved into the 21st century, research trials.
• 25:26
  and development continued to increase in the area of fecal medical transport.
• 25:37
  as this increased FMTs.
• 25:43
  As their use increased, so did their regulation.
• 25:49
  There began to be oversight on the stool to a greater degree and the samples would undergo testing before they were administered.
• 25:58
  As with any treatment, it has not been without its peculiarities.
• 26:03
  There have been some safety concerns issued by the FDA related to FMT, Fecal Medical Treatment.
• 26:10
  One of these was because the stool contained a medication that did not break down in the person's digestive tract and which reacted with the person receiving it, resulting in
• 26:20
  death.
• 26:21
  As a result, organizations formed to further test and research people's poop before they shoot your booty hole up with someone else's slurry.
• 26:33
  Now, in the modern era, there was a concern that someone could get COVID-19 through a poop enema.
• 26:39
  There's a story.
• 26:41
  CNN, I know you're just desperate for somebody to hear something.
• 26:46
  A poop enema story for you there.
• 26:49
  There have been approved drugs and treatments which have been prescribed and one of these drugs administered anally, means that's backside rail slide.
• 26:59
  was approved in 2022, three years ago.
• 27:03
  It's not that long ago.
• 27:06
  Much of this fecal medical transplants and treatments in the West was very experimental up until very recently.
• 27:18
  but if you don't want to hang one down the butt, can slide one down the top.
• 27:25
  Because the most modern, which it's not approved yet, and it wasn't formulated until 2023, under the drug name Voust, Voust uses live fecal microbiota spores in a form that can be
• 27:42
  taken orally.
• 27:44
  We're back.
• 27:47
  Fecal.
• 27:47
  transplants that you take by mouth.
• 27:53
  We've come full circle all the way back to ancient Chinese medicine.
• 27:56
  There's a lot going on here.
• 28:00
  And really, I think what's interesting, and I have a family member that has undergone a fecal medical transplant, and it greatly helped her.
• 28:06
  I think it actually saved her life.
• 28:12
  It's one of those things where there's so much stigma in taking in someone's poo.
• 28:21
  Because you have to get the right person's poo, can't just be anybody.
• 28:23
  And they say that someone that lives with you, their poo is better.
• 28:30
  Cause like your poo sinks up.
• 28:32
  There's an episode.
• 28:36
  But the question that I have is, would you ever go for the fecal medical transplant?
• 28:43
  Let me know.
• 28:45
  I'd be interested.
• 28:46
  And if you've ever had one or if you've ever needed one, send me an email, privycast.gmail.com.
• 28:52
  I'd love to talk to you about that.
• 28:53
  I'd love to hear more about that.
• 28:55
  But the history of fecal medical transplant is kind of short.
• 28:59
  And it's kind of wild that this is a thing that has just casually
• 29:05
  meandered into modern western medicine.
• 29:08
  That poo could just save your life or could rebalance that.
• 29:21
  This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
• 29:24
  Thank you for listening.
• 29:49
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• 29:52
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• 29:53
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• 30:01
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• 30:03
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• 30:13
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• 30:38
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• 30:41
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• 31:00
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• 31:04
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• 31:06
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• 31:09
  You can find links to their music down in the doodly bopper below.
• 31:14
  This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
• 31:17
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• 31:18
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• 31:20
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• 31:21
  Thank you so much for listening.
• 31:23
  Keep pooping in the free world.
• 31:24
  Own your stank.
• 31:26
  Scrub your nuts.
• 31:27
  And now, as always, don't forget to flush.