Dear Alana,
You raise some very interesting questions. Not surprisingly, this issue has sparked great debate not just amongst gastroenteroligists, but within the medical community as a whole. (I must say that it saddens me that you are no longer pre-med as clearly you think like a physician.)
There are two main schools of thought about poop eating in the setting of an outbreak of gastroenteritis. The predominant opinion is that although it is probably safe to resume eating your poop after you have recovered from the virus, a small percentage of those who do so will succumb to a mutated variant of the virus; hence the expression, “to eat shit and die”.
The minority viewpoint believes that you can in fact resume eating your poop but more significantly, much like milk maids were protected from smallpox because they had previously had cowpox (this is how Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine), one should protect themselves from virulent strains of gastroenteritis (such as the current one) by combining the right quantity of their poop with that of someone in the convalescent phase—hence the term, “get your shit together.” I hope that I have answered your question without getting overly technical.
Love,
Uncle David, M.D.
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