When death was knocking on the door of a Canadian man, he took drastic measures to save his own life -- with a self-injected fecal transplant.
The poop-injecting patient is a 66-year-old man from Albert Bridge, Nova Scotia, who suffered from a bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, since undergoing routine surgery 18 months ago, according to the Chronicle Herald.
The man, who spoke to the paper on the condition they would not reveal his name, said he was so frustrated and ill that he decided to get rid of the infection once and for all by giving himself an enema last Friday using feces belonging to his cousin that had been tested for other infections and parasites.
"It’s a nasty topic to discuss, but fecal transplants work, and I was not ready to wait any longer," the man told the paper.
Want to know how he did it? Here's the straight poop. Basically, he mixed the stool with water and flushed it into his nether regions using an enema, Gizmodo reported.
In the process, he jumped the gun. His doctor, Baroudi Fashir, was originally set to perform the "transpoosion" on March 9, but, despite it being approved by the hospital, there were no set guidelines for it so it could not go ahead.
Fashir was reportedly shocked when he learned that his patient had done the procedure himself.
"He did it by himself?" Fashir told the Chronicle Herald. "It’s not good to do by himself."
Treating medical patients with feces sounds, well, facetious, but some doctors think it's not such a crappy idea.
In fact, in September 2010, the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology published research suggesting that poop transplants could help patients suffering from the nasty clostridium difficile bug, which patients are increasingly catching in hospitals and nursing homes, according to AOL News.
Enemas are one way to inject the healing power of poop, but gastroenterologist Dr. Lawrence Brandt of New York's Montefiore Medical Center says a gastric tube inserted in the nose also can be good for what ails you.
"At the moment, it's a treatment of last resort," Brandt told AOL News. "But it's very efficient, with a cure rate of 90 percent for first-time users. Plus, it's safe with no adverse effects, and it's fast, sometimes solving the problem within hours."
But while Brandt believes that poop as medicine has "poo-sibilities," other experts like Dr. Saad Habba, a gastroenterologist at Overlook Hospital in Summit, N.J., isn't ready to flush the use of antibiotics down the toilet.
"Few of us can imagine using [stool], and it is unconventional," he admitted to AOL News. "Clearly, this is an end-of-the-road approach for recurrent C. Diff infection because of the obvious logistics of it."
