Baby Poop Smoothies in the Age of Nuclear, Autism and Autoimmune Disease. Caveat Emptor Y’All.

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ca·ve·at emp·tor
/ˌkavēˌät ˈem(p)ˌtôr/

1. the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.

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Baby poop smoothies.  Have people heard of this?  It’s along the same lines as fecal transplants, where both are alternative treatments used to treat and even “cure” various bowel ailments from which people are desperate, absolutely desperate for relief.  People suffering from gastrointestinal dysfunction and disease are literally willing to eat, drink and/or rectally insert other people’s shit in order to make themselves feel better, and as a Crohn’s patient myself whose serious debilitating illness was not responding to conventional care, I understand what would move anyone to attempt drastic measures to relieve the pain and disability of a crippling gastrointestinal condition which can quickly make anyone’s life unbearable.

In my own case, I submitted to suffered through 2 years’ worth of ineffective and damaging Western medical treatment for my Crohn’s; the relentless agony of un- and undertreated Crohn’s disease was hellish and terrifying, and despite accepting treatment I was only getting worse.  When I saw what was happening to me, and that the path I was on would not lead to a good place, I took my health and life into my own hands and moved across the country alone to legally treat with medical cannabis, otherwise known as marijuana.  If I hadn’t done that, and was left to suffer through more Western medical treatments (or no treatment at all) I would have likely sought relief with various alternative treatments with little or no regard for their weirdness, offensiveness, or likelihood of success.  Although I had researched fecal transplants and found that they are not indicated for small bowel Crohn’s, which I have, I am sure that eventually I would’ve come across the concept of, and been tempted to try, the Baby Poop Smoothie.

In fact, taking Baby Poop via rectal insertion, otherwise known as fecal transplant is the first thing my mother recommended to me when I reached out to her for help earlier this year and she ignorantly suggested that I needed to “up my game” with regard to my treatment because even though I had managed on my own to get about 50% better than I was before, was no longer getting worse, and I hadn’t had a single emergency in 3 years, all due to my handcrafted cannabis treatment protocol which I invented and financed alone, I was still sick.  Believe it or don’t, and blame me if you must, while I was able to find profound pain relief and some real healing using medical cannabis, I was unable to cure myself of an incurable disease.  Troublingly, but par for the course in cases of medically confounding illness including autoimmune disease, my mother is a nurse and even she refuses to believe the fucking peer-reviewed medical literature (and patients’ self-reports) that spell out plainly the truth about my condition: that the conventional treatments for Crohn’s either do not work, do not work well, or do not work for long; that the iatrogenic illnesses and injuries caused by the treatments themselves can be life threatening and cause compounding pain, disability and misery above and beyond the disease itself; that Crohn’s disease is both incurable and progressive; and that therefore, because of all these things, Crohn’s patients have a severely diminished quality of life and Crohn’s sufferers as a group have an astonishingly high suicide rate.

That’s about as bad as it gets anywhere in life ya’ll: a diagnosis of Crohn’s within the context of capitalism and patriarchy is a waking nightmare whose attendant horrors are only reliably quelled in death, literal death.

To reiterate, Crohn’s disease is both incurable and progressive, which means that no matter what treatments they take, Crohn’s patients are lucky to stay the same over time and to not get worse.  And the pain and misery of Crohn’s is literally unbearable.  The *only* thing Crohn’s patients can realistically hope for is to get some relief and some degree of healing from their relentless pain and symptoms and even that is elusive to almost everyone, or for long, where conventional treatments don’t fucking work and where alternative treatments in particular, even if they do work, are not subsidized the way conventional treatments are, and are therefore either flatly prohibitively expensive or financially unsustainable over time.  Unfortunately, as I have learned, that includes treatment with medical cannabis.

Enter the Baby Poop Smoothie.  Assuming you can somehow procure a baby, their poop is free, plentiful, renewable, and might even work as a treatment for gastrointestinal distress; apparently baby poop is loaded with probiotics (of course) and the idea appears to be that in the case of babies, unlike with adults, you can get medicinal-grade poop from a fresh gut that hasn’t been treated with antibiotics or otherwise compromised by various environmental toxins at all, or certainly for years and decades the way adults’ guts have been.  Get a baby who’s been fed exclusively breast milk from a mother who is healthy, untreated with antibiotics, and who only eats organic food herself (preferably) or a baby that’s graduated to eating exclusively organic baby food, collect their shit, blend with some other non-shit ingredients and drink!  Sounds good right?  To a Crohn’s or other inflammatory bowel disease patient already used to drinking sickening fluids in the form of enteral feeds, colonoscopy preps and the like, and who has already likely failed at numerous painful and debilitating treatments, the prospect of ingesting baby poop literally eating shit, if it held any promise to free them from crippling pain and symptoms of disease, sounds as benign and effortless as eating organic cotton candy at a vegan carnival in a dream.

But what’s really in any baby’s gut, considering that we have been living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare where (in the USA anyway) “we” have been nuclear-bombing our own people and our own territories for decades — since the 1940s?  Where babies have probably been being born with autism, autoimmune diseases and other ailments related to environmental contamination for generations by now, and where autistics and autoimmune patients are siring and birthing autistics and autoimmune patients themselves and have been for a long time — and where the guts of autism patients in particular are known to be bad, very bad, where autistic children are prone to diagnoses of inflammatory bowel disease themselves including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis?  Is anyone going to talk about that, and about how even newborn babies fed organic diets cannot reliably avoid exposure to environmental toxins including the ravages of man-made nuclear isotopes and toxins encountered in the wombs of sick or autoimmune women, and what that has likely done to the babies’ guts and by extension to their poop?

Is anyone, anyone going to interrogate the station in which we currently find ourselves, where people are so fucking incurably, progressively and desperately ill that they are ready and willing to drink shit to get even temporary relief from their unfathomable suffering, but where even finding healthy shit — shit that’s healthier than sick people’s own diseased shit — is harder than it sounds, meaning extremely difficult if not impossible?  In industrialized nations (or any nation or territory for that matter due to ocean currents and jet streams disseminating pollution globally) we likely cannot even find a single gram of healthy shit to save our very lives at this point people.  And as far as I can tell no one, and I mean no one is talking about this, where the cultural conversation instead consists of tittering about “superfoods” and the probiotic effects of drinking baby poop (and the general awesomeness of babies and of having baby after baby after baby in a postapocalyptic nuclear-contaminated world).  Fucking shit.