laughingduck said...
DBwithUC said...
I wish you the best health. I understand that 16 mo old children are too young to make suitable FT donors. The gut microbiota is not yet fully formed.
Unless you get really really dramatic results, I think a little less blood or a little more form would be fluctuations not related directly to FT in your case, because you are likely using "blanks".
I had the same thought myself. I am still giving a shot though because until we really know why fecal transplants work, we don't really know who will be a good donor and why. It could be that it is the more microbial variety the better, or it could be one particular strain that does the healing. I'll give it a month and see if there are improvements. It seems to me that it takes several ft to see improvement in uc sufferers as opposed to c. difficile. In the meantime I will try my best to stay away from trigger foods (ie chia!) :)Yes, both the variety and the specific microbe hypothesis are out there. But you chances under either hypothesis are reduced. An incomplete gut microbiome has less chance of having the specific one you need, and of course it has less variety. You might get lucky if it is one specific microbe strain, and your kid happens to have that one.
As for your observation that it takes "several FT", I think it might be more accurate to say it often takes MANY. Some have reported dramatic results after one or a few FT, but it is anecdotal - we can't even be sure they did not have c.diff or a placebo effect.
IMO, people confuse reports of treating c.diff with reports of treating UC and start spreading around all kinds of false statistics.
Here is a direct quote from Dr. Borody's 2011 editorial:
"It is our current clinical impression that, while C. difficile is easily eradicated with a single FMT infusion, this generally appears to not be the case in UC. From our initial publication in 2003 reporting on the treatment of six UC patients with five FMT infusions,
our subsequent unpublished experience is that multiple and recurrent infusions are required to achieve prolonged remission or cure. This observation raises a number of key questions to be answered: which type of colitis will be most suitable for treatment? What should the frequency pattern and duration of infusions be? Are younger patients more likely to achieve healing or cure? What proportion will actually achieve cure?"
So from the man himself, "multiple and recurrent infusions are required."
Yet idiots (some medical folk) often claim that Borody's success rate with UC is 90%. Bullcrap. He never published any such thing, or even said it at a conference, to my knowledge.
For example see this web page
www.ihaveuc.com/fecal-microbiota-transplantation-information/ where some idiot named Mark Davis, ND writes:
"according to his [Borody's] published work, when he uses FMT for people with UC, he gets about
a 50% success rate. By success, I mean drug-free, symptom-free, diet restriction-free people who have no evidence of UC when they get colonoscopy with biopsies [....] I’ve talked with Dr. Borody recently, and he says that since his published work, he’s refined the technique, and he claims a better than 90% success rate with UC patients."
There is no publication wit a 50% success rate. I have everything on FT the man has published. It does not exist. Mark Davis lies. I also do not believe his claim that Borody told him he now gets 90%. IF he had gotten anything even close to that kind of success, it would have been published. No doubt.
I applaud Mark Davis for offering the FT therapy to those who want to try, and especially for making screened donors available to those who do not have donors, but I want to stone him when he starts making idiotic claims. I suspect he is more interested in selling his $3500 treatment (not covered by insurance) than in truth.
He even reports:
"There have been UC sufferers who’ve taken poo from the diaper of a baby (child or grandchild), mixed it in a ziplock bag with some water, drawn it up into a bulb syringe, squirted it up their rear, and had almost immediate relief lasting up to 10 years!"
... when he should know this is a rumor or false claim because a baby in diapers does not have the gut microbiome to make FT viable. Yet he repeats this as if he knows it to be true in order to hawk his treatment.