Charlie Curtis with his mother Sky in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
Charlie Curtis with his mother Sky in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
A young man battling a debilitating gut condition used his mother’s faeces as medicine - and started to experience symptoms of her menopause.
Canadian Charlie Curtis took the dramatic decision to conduct DIY faecal microbiota transplants, or FMT, after fighting a losing battle against Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
For four years he transferred healthy faeces from his mother into his own rectum, he revealed in the new documentary Designer $hit, but it had some strange side effects.
Curtis and his mother Sky were one of the first to go public with the treatment, which has since moved from the margins to close to mainstream and began their journey in 2006, when Charlie was seriously ill in hospital, wracked with pain.
His colitis, an inflammatory condition that affects the colon and rectum, was so bad that he was informed his entire colon would be removed.
He was just 18 at the time, so his mother Sky searched for alternative treatments and found Thomas Borody in Sydney, a pioneer in FMT.
Borody initially recommended a different treatment but when that didn’t work and Charlie was diagnosed with Crohn’s, he instead advised they should try a transplant.
After much debate, Sky Curtis said her son decided “he would let me put poo up his bum to see if that would work”, she told the BBC in 2014.
Charlie Curtis with his mother Sky in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
They did their own transplant on Christmas Day, 2008. ”I kept thinking, ‘I’m giving my kid a bag of [faeces] for Christmas,” she said.
”It wasn’t ideal, but he was just so sick and I knew if I waited until after the Christmas holidays he would be dead.”
Sky Curtis told Designer $hit filmmaker Saffron Cassaday that they did the transplants “every day for a month, then every two days for a month, then every third day for a month. Once we got down to once a month, we did once a month for three and a half years,” each time with a freshly donated sample.
When Cassaday sat down with Charlie Curtis in 2019 he was off medication and free of symptoms, revealing that the treatment worked for him.
“When I was actually doing the procedure,” he told the film-maker, “I’d feel tingling inside of me. It felt healthy, it felt like it was working.
“I feel like I have a new system. I feel like I have a new body, like a new digestive system, and I feel like it’s working on my behalf now, which is great.
“I feel normal again.”
But he says there were side effects.
He had mood swings and experienced sweating and hot flashes. Menopause symptoms.
“At the time, I was going through menopause,” Sky Curtis said. “And so was he!”
Though Charlie Curtis’s experience is anecdotal, FMT guru Thomas Borody told Cassaday donated faeces do “transmit high levels of hormones”.
While it can’t be proven that Charlie’s symptoms were related to absorbing his mother’s hormones, there have been multiple instances where FMTs made positive changes to systems outside the gut.
A 2019 study found the treatment made “significant improvements both in GI and behaviour symptoms” in a small group of patients with autism spectrum disorders.
Other studies have shown it to improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and a 2017 study recorded two alopecia patients who regrew hair after the treatment.
