Background: Despite the conventional lexicon that poop is dirty, an agent of infection, and should be left for one place and one place only - the toilet, poop may be as powerful in its regenerative capacity as stem cells. Perhaps better. Roughly 40% of your feces is made up of bacteria living inside and shed from your gut. These species help us digest food, develop intestinal tissue, and fight off infections among many other things.

Disease: The bacteria in your gut are as much a part of you as your genes. The fact that some fraction of them come out in your waste is fortunate because these symbiotic bacteria can be used in the purest form of recycling that humans may ever know. Friends or family that are suffering month-to-month, or year-to-year, with debilitating or deadly diseases such as Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis (these first two are often referred to as IBD or inflammatory bowel disease), Clostridium difficile, etc know all too well the long and painful aspects of these diseases. In many cases, antibiotics are prescribed over and over, with each one that fails leading to more expensive ones that are also more difficult to get. The irony of the antibiotic ferris wheel is that antibiotics may be buying a little more time or even exacerbating the problem, while the solution happens to be right in front of us, or behind us to be technically accurate. The healthy bacteria in poop from a friend or family member can be "transplanted" into the gut of a sick patient and fully cure them in many cases.

Professor Thomas Borody (MD, PhD) is one of the leading physician scientists in this area and this video is definitely worth watching and sharing to classrooms, friends, and family.