The use of faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) to treat severe C. Difficile enterocolitis was visited in episode 14 of Everyday Medicine with Dr Darcy Holt as our guest. If you haven’t had an opportunity to listen to that conversation, please do and hopefully it will pique your interest. In this episode we invite a guest involved in active research at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital to discuss FMT in IBD broadly then more specifically as it applies to her current research project evaluating its efficacy in Crohn’s disease.

The transfer of stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of a recipient (FMT) at first consideration does not seem like a reasonable or scientific approach to the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases. Historically however, it has been used by communities for over 3,000 years, gaining credibility in 1958 after a paper by Eisemen in Denver who described treating pseudomembranous colitis this way.