Output Stream of Consciousness

It sounds like something right out of an old Saturday Night Live skit, but fecal transplants are real honest-to-goodness medical techniques for use, for example, when antibiotics have knocked out everything except the really nasty bacteria.

CBC covered it not too long ago. It was purportedly on television as well, but I didn't go out of my way to catch that special :)

Yes, it essentially involves taking a healthy person's poo, screening it, making an enema out of it and putting it up the patient's pipes.

Disgusting, perhaps, but with the good results reported in trials and application of the procedure in Scandinavia and the U.S., we might take a page from Buckley's mixture: it [seems] awful, and it works.

Thomas Louie at the Foothills hospital is one of the few practitioners Canada-side who performs the procedure. He has done his research on nasty bugs like Clostridium difficile.

He's also working on other less-disgusting techniques for lesser sufferers, including treatment with Tolemaver, a polymer which can bind to the toxins that C. difficile produces.