Antibiotics – the medical discovery that the modern world swooned over, has become as big a threat as those it was discovered to treat. Doctors saw this class of drug as a cure-all, or at the very least, a bandaid across a such a wide swath of minor conditions, that alarm slowly began growing that super-bugs were being created by this behaviour. That alarm began going off in the ’80’s, but warnings back then were ignored out of hand! In the ’90’s, hospital super-bugs began to emerge and those who sounded the first warnings were now shouting, “See??? We were right! Why didn’t you listen to us?!” Instead of heeding these voices again, doctors often blamed user error, claiming that when a patient doesn’t take the prescribed medication for the prescribed length of time, superbugs result because the bacteria grow resistent to the medication. it isn’t that this bacterial behaviour to weak medicine doesn’t happen, it was the use of this behaviour as a cop-out by the doctors. However, many in hospital beds were being given their meds like clockwork by the nurses and aides assigned to them, making it impossible to NOT finish their medication in it’s prescribed dosage and time length.
Enter the 2000’s, and water testers began finding antibiotics in drinking water of every major city they received samples from. Further digging into this phenomenon led to all manner of livestock herders using antibiotics in their herds and this also getting into the ground water and by extension, streams, rivers, lakes, and drinking water reservoirs. Those who study fish began noticing changes that got traced back to antibiotics that had gotten into their habitats from agriculture and city water treatment facilities. Most recently, such alarms are being sounded over antibiotic use in open-water fish farms.
The panacae of the antibiotic treatment regimen with all it’s promises of killing harmful bacteria, aiding in herd health, animal growth, etc, has become a pandora’s box of increasing trouble to both bacterial strains as well as the environment.
Now The Gold Report comes along highlighting a recent study suggesting that not only might antibiotics be harming the physical environment around us, but it might be harming the internal environment inside us as well.
“The study, conducted by Dr. Shai Bel, of Bar Ilan University in Israel, and his research team, focused on the impact of antibiotics on the development of IBD, given that it is already known that antibiotics disrupt the microbiome, the mix of bacteria in the intestines.”
“The research also revealed that two of the antibiotics studied, neomycin and vancomycin, induced what is called an Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response in the colon. ER stress limits the amount of mucus produced by goblet cells in the intestines.”
“They concluded that,
We have discovered that antibiotic use actually damages the protective mucus layer that separates the immune system in the gut from the microbiome…”
“In this new study, the aim was to mimic a short-term course of antibiotics in humans, by administering antibiotics to mice twice a day for just three days. Four different antibiotics, each from a different class, were tested.
The researchers found that all of the four antibiotic types damaged the mucus barrier, allowing bacteria in the intestines to penetrate the intestinal wall:
We found that all four antibiotics tested led to breakdown of the mucus barrier”
“In fact, the effect of antibiotics was so immediate that within a few minutes of introducing one of the antibiotics, vancomycin, the ability of certain intestinal cells to produce mucus was already impaired…”
Recovery from such damage was found to be doable using a particular bile acid, but it took 6 yo 8 weeks for full recovery, and that wasn’t in humans, it was in mice.
“Dr. Bel also stressed that his team was interested in looking at ways to minimize the necessity for antibiotics, given the drawbacks, while recognizing their important contribution…”
I now question their contribution, and echo The Gold Report in the observations others have done showing the damage antibiotic drugs have done in creating various “modern-day” diseases. In my own home, it would be somewhere between 2010 and 2013 when I first became allergic to penicillin, nearly going into anaphylactic shock over the dose I took, and refusing to leave the doctor’s office until they found out what changed. They were calling it 2nd Generation at that point, and within months of my experience, one horse got badly ill from it and another died later that summer. Horses require far more of it than we do to treat their ailments, it should be noted. Since that time, I’ve run into others who are allergic to it who weren’t before, and who have their own horror stories in themselves or their animals.
But are we stuck with penicillin-based medications to treat bacterial infections, or do other answers exist? Do other ways to negatively impact gut health exist outside of antibiotics? The Gold Report would say yes:
“While antibiotics reduce mucus production, other factors do as well, such as a low-fiber Western-style diet, and studies have shown that within just 3 to 7 days of adopting such a diet (from a previously high-fiber one), the mucus growth rate drops.”
If there are ways to kill your gut without using antibiotics, there are also ways to address bacterial infections without manmade antibiotics.
One thing to note when we consider antibiotics negatively impacting the human or critter’s body, is the very word itself:
anti- against, bio – life, otic – method of or tool for. A tool to kill life, or a method of killing life.
The word itself is very generic and not focused on a narrow band of life at all. Yes bacteria are tiny lives living within us, some of them good, some of them bad, but we need to manage those lives, not wipe them out wholesale! Antibiotics are known to strip the gut of healthy bacteria right alongside bad bacteria! Antibiotics also have other side-effects they might cause as well, one of which my daughter has been slowly healing from ever since she took just TWO doses of amoxicillin, for a dental visit she’d had. Over 2 years later, the kidney/liver damage she suffered is finally most of the way healed up, but she isn’t out of the woods yet. She is a very current example of these drugs harming the body as well as the supposed bacteria they were intended to kill off.
Rather than rely on antibiotics, there are foods, herbs and spices that exist, that were used in millennia past to address harmful ill health in the body. Some will call them bacteria, some will call them viruses, some call them terrain (if you go by Ayervedic medicine), etc. The conditions these herbs addressed in history continue to address them now regardless of the term we use to describe them. The conditions we now call viruses for example, were known by various names prior to the invention of the term. The conditions didn’t come on the scene after the term was coined, they were simply now classified in a new way. There was a time in Europe when respiratory illness were lumped into the category of “evil air”, as one example.
We also know that using antibiotics to treat viruses is a fool’s errand and can cause other health issues to rear up. In the herbal space, it is better to identify foods, herbs and spices more specifically as anti-bacterial (or anti-microbial as some put it), anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-septic, etc. This is so that with proper identification, you can know which herbs to grab for which conditions and not only be more laser-focused in addressing those health issues, but do so safely.
The list of foods God has given us that are anti-bacterial, anti-viral, or both, is amazingly long! Many of them are eaten as general food sources but when doubled down on such as increasing one’s citrus intake, can be extremely beneficial! When dried, some foods such as garlic and onion, and even ginger, get stronger in their dried state to the point you need to be careful how much you give yourself to avoid complications from overdosing. Adding black pepper increases these qualities by 10 fold!
Learning the foods, herbs and spices God has growing in your area could help you the way it’s helped us, in keeping my own family out of the pharmacy for the better part of the past 9 years. There are very few things we go in there for now, resulting in huge savings in the bank account! When your cupboard is stocked with dried herb that you can put into a tea infusion, oil infusion, coconut oil or beeswax infusion, vinegar infusion or glycerine infusion, toss into soups, smoothies, sprinkle over food, add unpasteurized honey to, make electuaries from, etc, it may just save you money and complications as well.
If you want to learn how to avoid the need for manmade antibiotics, drop me a line and let’s chat. We’ll discuss your current health situation, what concerns you have, why you want to steer clear of manmade medicine, and how to go about that safely. It all begins with filling out my client intake form and your first session is free. Don’t worry, I won’t make you go vegan!
