Hey, everyone, it's Lizzie. Earlier this year, Slate's Luke Winky wrote a story all about poop.

Okay, technically, it's actually about what's called FMT fecal microbiota transplant,

which, to put it as simply as possible, is the process of getting someone else's poop

inside your body to fix problems with your gut. What Luke found was

an unregulated marketplace for buying other people's poop and a DIY community that was

desperate for relief, often after the traditional medical system had failed them. So yes,

it is a story about poop, but it's also a story about

our broken health care system, and the lengths people will go to to find the care that they need.

I hope you enjoy it.

A few months ago, my colleague Luke Winky met a woman named Alexandra.

Alexandra is a 66-year-old retiree on the East Coast who basically told me that she suffered from

a large variety of gastrointestinal problems, your IBS, your cystitis, you know, a bunch of bad gut stuff.

Stuff that her doctors couldn't seem to figure out.

And in her journeys through conventional medicine, she felt she was kind of turned away or ignored.

I felt like she was kind of regarded as like an anxious old woman.

And that caused her to look elsewhere. and that caused her discover FMT.

FMT, that's fecal microbiota transplant.

It's basically exactly what it sounds like, putting good microbes into the body of a person whose

gut is out of whack. How they get them in there, though, here is a doctor who does it at the Mayo Clinic.

One way to restore that is to take the healthy bacteria that normally live in the colon

from a healthy person and re-implant those back into the colon

of the sick person. A little gross in concept, but fine, it makes sense.

...