Just a quick heads up, especially for any squeamish listeners, we are going to talk about poop today.

Okay, here's the show. 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 your IBS your cystitists you know a bunch of bad gut stuff 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 costs her discover FMT.

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, 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.

Except Alexandra wasn't eligible for FMT in a hospital setting.

So she did what a lot of people do these days. She went online.

If you go to certain sub-retits or certain Facebook groups, you'll see people, you know, doing this completely independently all by themselves there's I remember I read a

very memorable thread on the subreddit about a guy being like yeah you know so I've been

getting my dad's poop but it goes beyond just gut ailments. There are people you will see on these

FMT communities that believe that superior gut health or the gut bacteria could solve their schizophrenia or their depression or their

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