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Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist, saved a patient by transplanting a piece of her husband’s excrement into her colon:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The microbes in the man’s excrement replaced those absent in the patient:
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Link via The Agitator | Photo (unrelated) from Flickr user pnoeric used under Creative Commons license
His friends call him “the man with the bionic bottom.” Ged Galvin permanently lost control of his colon after a motorcycle accident. But surgeons moved one of his knee muscles to his colon and attached electrodes to it. He can clench or unclench it with a remote control that he carries in his pocket:
“They call me the man with the bionic bottom, but that doesn’t bother me. My gratitude to the surgeons is endless because what they have done is a miracle.”Mr Galvin, who had previously endured the indignity of carrying a colostomy bag, added: “I thought that in these days of modern medicine surely there was something they could do. They’d mended everything else – why not this? Anything was better than a colostomy bag.
“The operation changed my life and gave me back my pride and confidence. Because of the remote control I can lead a normal life again.”
Link via Geekologie | Image: SWNS
You might or might not consider this to be good news. Enrico Grasso of the University Hospital Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, has developed a pill-sized robot that can crawl around inside a patient, searching for signs of cancer. Alastair Jamieson writes in The Daily Telegraph:
Pills containing cameras already exist, but this is believed to be the first that can be controlled after it has been swallowed.
Once the examination has finished, the spider pill exits the body naturally.
It has been successfully tested on pigs but further trials will be needed before it can be cleared for use by doctors.
Elisa Buselli, one of the scientists working on the project that created the spider pill, said: “This should improve the situation not just for the patient but also the doctor.”
Link via Popular Science | Image: BBC News
