When feces is the best medicine

Fecal transplantation—transferring the feces of a healthy person into the bowel of someone with an infection—appears in published case reports as early as 1958. But in the past few years, scientists have established with more rigor that it can resolve recurrent C. diff infections around 90 percent of the time. In 2013, a randomized controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the procedure worked better for this condition than antibiotics—so much better that researchers stopped the study early, saying it was unethical to continue to deny the transplants to the control group.