cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25519139
Gut health gone wild
Man, if only you knew. Maybe you do, I dunno.
But the scale they're using doesn't even begin to cover it all. There's some things that show up as a smell in poo, like diabetes in particular where you get a fermented fruit smell underneath the usual scatole forward smell.
There's medications that make some unpleasant odors, with opiates being one of the more subtle but distinctive ones. Fish oil for cholesterol is unmistakable. Antibiotics throw the entire digestive tract into chaos, so there's a span where poo can smell kinda neutral before the bacteria rebound, and then you get some weird mixes. Poo can smell like a dead body that's starting to bloat (and gods, that smell is one you'll never mistake as anything else) after antibiotics. Which isn't surprising that cadaverine is possible, but when it's the predominant smell, it's crazy until you run across it enough times that you don't literally run to your charge nurse thinking something's wrong.
What's really fun is when you run across someone that's post-antibiotic, has a ton of medications that generate smells, and eat bad. I once smelled what I thought for sure was a dead, rotting skunk. Which I have smelled before, so it isn't a random comparison, it smelled almost identical. That one hit me one morning going into a patient's home, and I was dreading trying to sort out how to handle a dead animal stinking up the place, because who handles that for the patient?
But I went to check the patient first, of course, and it was them.
Those biochemical factories in our intestines are amazing, and horrible.
