[aroch]

    It's haphazard, but at least people here are trying, right?

No, no, no, no.

We should not encourage people to randomly experiment on themselves under the guise of "being a hacker" when those experiments can pose significant threat to life. Unscreened, random FMT can have a number of potentially life threatening outcomes; stool contain human serum, blood, lymphocytes, viruses and other biologics that can be harmful.

[colevscode]

OP: I agree completely, unscreened "random" FMT would be a very bad idea. The donor in this case was definitely not random.

[aroch]

Knowing the donor, calling them your close friend, is not the same thing as medically screening both of you and the poo before the transfer.

[logfromblammo]

But it is thousands of dollars cheaper, which is kind of the whole point. People wouldn't be doing this themselves [as often] if genuine elective medical treatments were not priced out of reach.