The “yellow soup” was a therapy described in Chinese medical texts in the 4th century after Christ, to cure certain serious intestinal infections.

The technique used for the fecal bacteriotherapy has been being developed since 2003 by Dr. Thomas J. Borody’s team in Australia, as an alternative treatment in pseudomembranous colitis. In the same year a research team from SMDC Medical Center in Minnesota published a work that for the first time described the method of 18 cases of patients with Clostridium difficile infection.

Transplantation of fecal microbiota, more prosaically called fecal transplant can correct severe cases of diarrhea caused by a very bad germ, Clostridium difficile, against which many antibiotics no longer work.

The transplant takes place through an infusion of feces from a healthy donor, diluted in a saline solution through a feeding tube that starts from the nose to the duodenum or directly in the intestines through a colonoscope. The material used comes from healthy individuals who have been tested to rule out that they are carriers of disease. Transplantation works because the feces contain hundreds or even thousands of bacteria, some of these bacteria have healing powers as they antagonize pathogens such as Clostridium difficile and restore the normal intestinal flora.

The main advantage of the fecal bacteriotherapy is to reduce the risk of inducing antibiotic resistance in bacteria with high pathogenicity.