Would you use someone else’s poop as medicine?
Could you imagine allowing or even wanting a leech or maggot to crawl around on
your body? These 3 disgusting natural remedies may be cringe-worthy but they
could just save your life!
- Fecal Transplant Therapy
Fecal
transplant therapy is exactly what it sounds like. It takes the stool from
a healthy person and places it inside a patient with severe digestive disease
for the purpose of a cure. The idea behind fecal transplant therapy is that
digestive disease is caused by an imbalance in the microflora of the gut. The
stool from a healthy person re-introduces this good bacteria, which immediately
repopulates the gut and cures disease.
The procedure can be done in a medical setting
via a colonoscopy, nasogastric tube, or capsules. Or it can be done at home via
enema. The first successful fecal transplant was conducted in 1958. Once
considered a “fringe” therapy, FMT recently caught the attention of the FDA and is now being tested as a
patentable mainstream medical treatment.
- Modern Leeching
Leeching or “blood-letting via leeches” was a
very popular medical therapy back in the 1800s. It may surprise you to know
that it hasn’t completely fallen out of favor with the conventional medical
community. Picture this: You’re chopping up some vegetables for a salad and all
of a sudden the knife slips, chopping off the tip of your finger. You manage to
keep your wits about you long enough to put the finger in a plastic bag filled
with ice and get to the hospital. The doctor re-attaches the finger but a day
later, the fingertip is blue.
When a finger is re-attached, it’s easy to affix
the capillaries but much harder to reconnect the veins. This means your blood
only has a one-way road that is soon be blocked off by clots. Without leeches,
your nail bed would have to be ripped off to allow slow blood drainage. With
modern leeching, a little critter is placed on your fingertip to slowly (and
far less painfully) drain the blood.
- Medical Maggots
You know those slimy,
white, wriggling critters you’ve seen in horror movies and in garbage cans? Can
you imagine putting them on your body? Plenty of people do. Medical maggots act
as microsurgeons, repairing infected wounds that have been unresponsive to
standard medical treatments. Burns, sores, and ulcers that refuse to heal after
two or more conventional attempts are treated with medical maggots.
For each square centimeter
of wound, 5-10 maggots are used. They are placed on the wound, dressed, and
left on for 72 hours. The maggots secrete digestive juices that dissolve
liquefied tissue and bacteria, cleaning out the wound and preventing the spread
of infection.
