Kickas.org Forums Treatments, Drugs and Alternatives Alternatives and ALCHEMISTS Fecal transplant & Helminthic therapy

Fecal transplants just got easier to swallow. The procedure, in which the bacteria from a healthy gut are implanted into an unhealthy one, has gotten a lot of buzz over the past year. But the treatment generally requires a colonoscopy — a procedure that's both uncomfortable and expensive.

In a study published Saturday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers report that the same success rate can be reached by processing the healthy excrement into capsules and administering the pills by mouth.

But several companies are working on commercializing encapsulated fecal donations (or trying to create cocktails of bacteria that have the same effect on a patient's gut), and they're banking on wider uses eventually coming to light — and getting FDA approval. "The human microbiome is just an exploding area of science," Hohmann said, "and we're still figuring out what we might do with these communities of bacteria."

Other diseases of the gut like inflammatory bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease are next at bat. But theoretically, FMT could even be used to treat obesity.