The bacteria that live in our healthy guts are a garden of cooperating and competing species that help to determine our intestinal health. When we take antibiotics, we kill countless bystander bacteria in our guts and sometimes develop changes in our digestion which can be severe. Clostridium Difficile infection is one of these conditions, a superinfection with a bacterium which is pretty resistant to antibiotics and causes infection of the colon with diarrhea, sometimes fever, nausea and vomiting and occasionally death. We treat Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff) diarrhea with a couple of antibiotics to which it is sensitive, but they don't work very well and some patients become chronically infected. What does work for C. Diff, when all else fails, is a fecal transplant, that is to say taking stool from a healthy person and putting it into the gut of a person who has the infection. This is a stinky procedure in which genuine human poop, from a human who has been tested for disea...
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.