Around the clinical world, there’s a growing awareness of the importance of the microbiome in a human’s gut. But in some ways, doctors have known this for a very long time, as we’ll see a bit later. Pre-Victorian medicine took a significant interest in the shapes, sizes and colors of someone’s defecations. And that through-line continues, in some ways, to today.
In today’s scientific world, it’s not so much about color, or shape or size. It’s about the exact analysis of bacteria living and growing in the intestinal system. The microbiome, as with any complex microcosm, is a wild and colorful place, to be sure, with all kinds of colonized life (no pun intended) generating vast panoramic landscapes that could have quite real effects on our overall health.
“Because the microbiome is a key interface between the body and the environment, these microbes can affect health in many ways and can even affect how we respond to certain environmental substances,” writes the author of an explainer on the microbiome at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a government asset that tries to raise awareness on human anatomy studies. “Some microbes alter environmental substances in ways that make them more toxic, while others act as a buffer and make environmental substances less harmful.”
Your Poop and You
For more, let’s go to engineer and entrepreneur Scott Hinkle and a TED Talk he gave recently, where he rhapsodized on the scientific value of feces, explaining how kings and world leaders of different eras guarded and utilized their stool samples.
How does AI come into the picture? Hinkle revealed that he has created “AI-powered toilet cameras” for inspecting this most delicate product of human digestion to, as he put it, “shed light on the gold mine of wisdom in our waste.”
And, he suggested, our poop is chock full of data. “It’s packed with health information about what’s going on inside you.”
Out of Sight in the Sewers: Clinical Change in the Modern Age
OK, so if craps are so informative, why don’t we still pay them the same kinds of attention?
Hinkle describes one change: “The advent of modern plumbing made plagues a thing of the past, but in solving one problem, we created another,” he said. “Plumbing pushed our waste out of sight, out of mind and out of our natural awareness. And second, at roughly the same time, Victorian-era modesty reshaped Western culture … we literally stopped talking shit.”
Then there’s the other major change: that instead of peering closely at fully formed stool and inspecting its visual attributes, we have moved toward molecular inspection with fine-tuned modern instruments. In any case, Hinkle thinks we neglect the poop now.
“Today, there are millions of people living with chronic conditions that manifest in the gut and urinary tract, which shape their lives in ways we don’t talk about enough,” he said, specifically naming irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis and colon cancer, which is taking people much younger than it used to.
“Last year, 150,000 Americans were diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and a third of them died from it,” he said. That’s more than annual car accident deaths in the United States. “We live in a world where our favorite [wearable] can detect an irregular heartbeat, allowing us to take preventive action early. But when it comes to our guts, we are back in the dark ages, waiting until our symptoms are screaming at us before we pay attention.”
Undaunted, Hinkle moves through other kinds of semi-related health issues, like kidney stones and benign prostate hyperplasia, talking about better intervention through data, before circling back to stool power and the need to look more closely at our gut health.
“What if we could monitor our body’s most honest intimate signals, turning our daily routines into actionable insights? What if we could see trends in our gut and urinary health, catching complications when they are easiest to address?”
Maybe that’s what the AI toilet cameras are for. Here’s more from Futurism, where these devices, including one called Throne, can analyze your No. 1 and your No. 2, according to registered profiles, and ignore “the noise around the signal” (the waste of a guest in your home) to give you rankings on things like dehydration and stool health, or perhaps warn of pending polyps that may, in time, become cancerous.
It bears thinking: if we can make data-driven medicine more available, more pervasive and more effective, we’ll save lives. And that’s worth doing.
