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Courtesy Shoop family
Pat Shoop, center, received a fecal transplant to treat a life-threatening Clostridium difficile infection. The 75-year-old Minneapolis teacher was transplanted with stool from her husband, Bob, left, in a procedure that a new review shows is effective in 92 percent of cases. The couple's children are Doug Shoop, far left, and Teri Quamme, far right.
After 52 years of marriage, Pat Shoop thought she'd shared every intimacy possible with her husband, Bob.
But that was before she became so ill with a Clostridium difficile infection last year that doctors suggested that a spousal stool transplant -- yes, a dose of Bob’s feces -- might be the only way to save her life.
“I'd heard of intercourse, but I'd never heard of 'pooper-course,'" Shoop, 75, of Minnetonka, Minn., jokes now. At the time, though, there was nothing funny about it.
“I was so sick, I didn’t care," she recalled. "It feels like the worst case of flu you could possibly, possibly have.”
Shoop, a longtime schoolteacher, was suffering from recurrent C. diff infection, a potentially life-threatening bacterial illness that causes severe diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting. It comes back again and again, resisting most treatments, except, as it turns out, an infusion of stool from a healthy donor.
A new review of more than two dozen scientific reports involving 317 patients, some dating back 50 years, finds that fecal bacteriotherapy, commonly known as fecal transplant, cured the problem in 92 percent of the cases. Nearly all got better after just one treatment. That's a better record than other treatments, including probiotics, toxin-binding molecules and an experimental vaccine.
The review offers the most comprehensive evidence so far in favor of the repugnant-sounding practice in which stool from a healthy donor is emulsified, usually mixed with water or saline, and transferred via a nasal tube or enema to the gut of a seriously ill C. diff patient.
“It’s considered a treatment of last resort,” said Amee R. Manges, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who led the review published in the most recent issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Once transplanted, the healthy fecal bacteria help restore balance to the patient’s bowels. C. diff infections typically develop after the intestinal flora is disturbed, usually by overuse of certain antibiotics. For most of the last decade, fecal transplants have been regarded as something of a fringe treatment by outsiders, but as a viable treatment by doctors who see desperate C. diff patients every day.
"It validates what we've thought all along," said Dr. Tim Rubin, a gastroenterologist with Essentia Health in Duluth, Minn., whose team performed its 119th fecal transplant last week. "We quote people a success rate of about 90 percent."
Shoop, who was diagnosed in May 2010, believes she contracted the infection either while in a nursing home for a broken arm or in a hospital for breast cancer treatment. Rates of C. diff acquired in health care settings have skyrocketed in recent years, climbing more than 200 percent in people older than 65 between 1996 and 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 20 percent and 50 percent of those patients may wind up with hard-to-treat recurrent infections, Rubin said.
For Shoop, getting an appointment with Dr. Rubin was a godsend. She and her husband stayed at a nearby hotel, where Bob, 77, was under pressure to produce a usable stool sample within 15 minutes of her scheduled appointment.
“We gave him chocolate, we gave him wine, we gave him steak,” she said.
Bob complied and the pair rushed to the clinic, where Dr. Rubin snaked a tube through Shoop’s nose and into her stomach.
“It was 20 minutes,” she said. “He told me, ‘You’re not going to taste it, you’re not going to smell it.’” And she didn’t.
That was on a Thursday. By Sunday afternoon, Shoop was better. Nearly a year later, she says she still feels fine. Her health is so much improved, in fact, that Shoop has become an ambassador of sorts for fecal transplant, sharing her story with anyone who raises the specter of C. diff.
“I tell them I know of a procedure that works,” said Shoop, who believes she would have died without it.
“Now, I’m disgustingly normal."
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Leave a Comment:
Alas, a cousin of mine died from C-Diff last year. Horrible ending, nothing worked. Jaw-dropping as this treatment sounds, it might have helped her.
WOW!!
I'm so sorry to hear of your cousin's passing from C- Diff, it's killed many people already and I'm sorry she didn't get the chance to have this procedure.
So you're saying he took a dump down her throat to cure her?
Looks like nature succeeds where man's technology fails. A simple fecal transplant fixes a dangerous and possibly fatal disease.
I'm sure the doctors charged them $1000 for the procedure plus lab work. Ya gotta love medicine, making everything expensive.
All of you who are in an uproar over the nasal tube thing....just be glad you aren't the one that has to mix the stool into a slurry and feed it into the tube!
That would be a most unpleasant job.
So, how does one(&who would) put fecal transplant ambassador on one's resume?
Great article. In most cases, the c-dif is caused by the overgrowth of clostridium when normal bacterial fauna is disturbed by long-term use of antibiotics to treat an infection such as osteomyelitis, not just a "normal" infection for a week or two. It is common to prescribe probiotics as well, or yogurt, in between doses to keep some balance in flora. However, normal stool contains hundreds of different bacteria, so I could see how this would work. Also, c-dif is different from other bacteria in that it has a waxy coat that just about nothing can kill except bleach. Ironically, bleach is the one thing they don't use in hospitals. Instead, they use a quaternary ammonia compound that doesn't release fumes, but of course this makes the use of bleach dangerous as it could inadvertently cause a poisonous gas. Also, some hospitals use carpet, and c-dif causes terrible diarhhea, and there are many "accidents" on carpet, and bleach is the only thing that kills c-dif, and you can't use bleach on carpet.....So, just remember to wash your hands. Usually, c-dif will go away in a few months as your body balances it out. Its just one of hundreds of germs living in your gut.
Pretty good procedure! But this article does not mention source of the C. dif. Is this nasty bacteria "caught in the hospital", or does in take over when massive doses of antibiotics are given to the patient in the hospital?
They were bleaching everything in the Cardiac Rehab facility I go to last spring: now they don't its back to alcohol????
We've been using this modality for decades as equine veterinarians. Works great for them, too.
That is some crazy sh*t!
So, Bob Shoop shat poop for Pat Shoop's stool soup? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Actually the word on the street is ''poo switcharoo." I had it done a week ago and am feeling much better already!! And, the procedure was not disgusting at all, it's saving my life which was quickly coming to an end. You don't have a clue unless you've walked in my shoes for the past year and a half. The procedure was very easy, my son was my donor, and I'm so grateful for his 'donation.'
Just posted a little interview with Dr. Mark Davis. He offers Fecal Microbial Therapy as part of his natural medicine practice in Portland, Oregon. Read about it at
Visit my Fecal Transplant advocacy blog for more information
or www [dot] fecaltransplant [dot] info
Here is a very serious question: what about using probiotics, acidophilus, and Dannon DanActive instead of going to the extremes of sharing bodily fecal matter?
Now on the lighter crazier side: perhaps there is an ulterior motive to using fecal matter. If we can accept fecal matter as medicine, we will think that we really have hit the jack pot when and if we ever have to live in filth and squalorlike if that is what our future holds for us, a wonderful richly diversified third world country lifestyle. It also fits right in there with the occassional drinking of urine, bathing in blood, drinking blood, and eating movie marvelous and science fiction futuristic "soylent-green" human flesh. It will be okay if done in the name of medicine instead of as dark rituals and Satanism.
I think they mixed her name up...should be Shat Poop.