Last week a patient dying from C. difficile, a bacterium that strikes in the intestines, was cured by receiving a stool transplant from a healthy donor. No antibiotic had helped her and her native immune system was not good enough to protect her against this superbug.
The focus of the report was the superbug. The stool transplant got one measly line, despite being the hero of the case. I wonder why…
Could it be because of the bias against non-pharmaceutical cures?
Could it be that interventions that strengthen our body’s innate power to heal are not good for business?
What industry is heavily advertising on the national news?
References
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-report-identifies-two-new-potentially-deadly-superbugs-2019-11-13/
“The evolution of the use of fecal microbiota transplantation and emerging therapeutic indications,” J. Lancet 2019;394:420
“Developments in high-throughput microbial genomic sequencing and other systems biology techniques have given novel insight into the potential contribution of the gut microbiota to health and disease. As a result, an increasing number of diseases have been characterized by distinctive changes in the composition and functionality of the gut microbiota; however, whether such changes are cause, consequence, or incidental to the disease in question remains largely uncertain. Restoration of the gut microbiota to a premorbid state is a key novel therapeutic approach of interest, and fecal microbiota transplantation—the transfer of prescreened stool from healthy donors into the gastrointestinal tract of patients—is gaining increasing importance in both the clinical and research settings. At present, fecal microbiota transplantation is only recommended in the treatment of recurrent Clostridioides difficileinfection, although a large number of trials are ongoing worldwide exploring other potential therapeutic indications.”
