[HillRat]

While I'm a huge proponent of patient autonomy and knowledge, it's really, really, really a bad idea to perform fecal microbiota transplantations at home, without medical equipment or training, and with an unvetted donor. I do hope that FMTs become an accepted part of medical practice -- the clinical results are more than encouraging -- but this kind of experimentation could go bad pretty fast.

[colevscode]

I agree, and I don't intend to encourage people to be casual about the risks involved. But I'm also concerned about the possibility that this incredible tool will become inaccessible.

[HillRat]

Agreed! Thankfully, the FDA backed off requiring IND applications for FMTs last year, so the clinical burden is much less than was originally anticipated.

The µBiome stuff is really quite cool, but we don't really have the clinical data to properly analyze the results (which is why they include investigational surveys into the mix, so they are advancing the state of knowledge out there). Comparing your microflora to population averages doesn't tell us much, and there may be very good reasons for deviations from the mean. Having a FMT performed from a clean donor probably won't have any significantly deleterious effects (my gut feeling -- be here all week, folks -- is that a full antibiotics course is far more serious in effects, and we usually bounce back fine from these), but right now we're just tweaking dials on a machine we don't properly understand.

Nonetheless, I love the fact that you're keeping this data on yourself! Self-quantification is a huge step in maintaining health, and I'd love to read more about what you're doing.

[rdmirza]

FMT is already used as a treatment for c. dif here in Canada.