Gut Flora
milhayser | February 8, 2013It's not often that medical science seems nuttier than its alternative. On Respectful Insolence, Orac dismisses the enema as a cure for all ills, writing that the "liver, colon, and kidneys" are specialized to remove toxins, and you won't "become chronically ill if you don’t shoot water up your butt periodically to wash the poop out." On the other other hand, "bowel lavage" played an important role in a new study of patients infected by Clostridium difficile, which can cause chronic diarrhea and even death. But critically, after flushing the patient's poop out, researchers put someone else…
lborkowski | August 20, 2010Check out Carnal Carnival #1: Essentials of Elimination, hosted by Bora at A Blog Around the Clock. It's a fascinating collection of blog posts all about poop. (The post I put up yesterday on sanitation is among them.) Many of the posts are about the interesting things scientists can learn by studying excrement - human or animal, fresh or fossilized.
A couple of the posts deal with a topic that seems to be attracting more and more attention: gut flora, or the microbiome. Basically, our digestive systems are colonized by a range of microbes, some of which assist us with digestion and vitamin…