[RonTheLogician]

Hello Dani,

As a former pre-med student, I hope the following may prove of interest to you.

At very long last I have been able to discover a potential health benefit of ATM. Of course, I'd like to emphasize the word POTENTIAL and encourage anyone with any type of serious medical problem to seek the guidance of a qualified professional.

You can thank your neighbors at the Mayo Clinic right there in metro Phoenix for this helpful information. They write the following here.

"Clostridium difficile is a huge problem for the elderly," says Robert Orenstein, D.O., of Mayo Clinic in Arizona...

The incidence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has risen sharply over the last two decades. The number of cases among hospitalized adults tripled between 1993 and 2005...

"Patients with CDI are missing certain gut flora, usually as a result of antibiotic use," Dr. Orenstein explains... "Restoring the missing flora seems to be the key."

...he says, one therapy - fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT or fecal transplantation) - has proved highly effective at eradicating C. difficile infection and restoring a healthy gut microbiota.

Call it Two Girls, One Cup ...AND a physician?

Now, despite the well-worn bromide "Don't try this at home!" some people seem to be doing just that. Consider the unvetted how-to-guide offered by the author of the Web site ThePowerOfPoop.com on the page here.

Further, the BBC Discovery series episode on the 6th of this month, titled "Patients Doing It for Themselves" profiles lay, at-home execution of a fecal transplant in a three-minute segment starting 13min 38sec into the podcast here. Also included are the remarks of a Scottish physician who uses nasal injection. (And you thought haggis-making recipes were disgusting, LOL!) He neglects to explain why the feeding tube is administered nasally rather than orally; perhaps it is simply a matter of mechanical stability and aim away from the trachea (windpipe)?

In any event, the cited Mayo Clinic article elaborates so:

Fecal transplantation can be performed via nasogastric tube, nasojejunal tube, upper tract endoscopy, colonoscopy and retention enema. Dr. Orenstein says he prefers colonoscopic infusion because it safely and effectively delivers healthy bacteria to the site of most C. difficile infections.

"If something goes wrong with nasogastric insertion, the complications could be disastrous," he notes...

Naturally, self-ATM cannot be used for fecal transplantation (unless of course someone defecates into your anus first; has that paraphelia made it into porn yet?) But as the old joke goes, I guess if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you must practice and practice and practice!

Long before humans trod the earth, other species took to $hit-eating naturally. For example, rabbits routinely eat their own night poop, as explained here. You might want to keep that in mind the next time you take your nephew Carter to a petting zoo and are tempted to kiss the cute widdle bunny wabbit wight on the mouth! Aww! (And at last we know why chocolate Easter bunnies are never made out of white chocolate.)

New-born elephants eat their mother's poop, to acquire the microbes they need to lead a healthy life, a rationale hardly unlike that which underlies the restorative human therapy detailed above. Many years ago I saw a film (which I recall was made by Sir David Attenborough) that includes a graphic depiction of the baby elephant digging in. Had it been easy to locate, I would have extracted a suitable frame and added the subtitle: "Yum! Just like Mom used to make!" Maybe your "taste" for ATM is an evolutionary left-over, like the appendix?

You know what? Now I'm starting to wonder if they really told us the WHOLE truth about eating the yellow snow... ;-P

Bottoms up!
RtL