Herbal vs synthetic antibiotics?

[LSD-Rumi]

A lot of stage green people like to popularize the idea that herbal antibiotics are better and safer and there is no need for synthetic ones. Are they being silly? Is there something I am missing? I mean synthetic antibiotics generally have a good safety profile and are well tolerated by people and they are very effective in fighting most infections. So, why I would even think of using natural hippie products when I have superior drugs?

 

Edited October 30, 2021 by LSD-Rumi

[LSD-Rumi]

@Michael569 Your thoughts?

[Michael569]

3 hours ago, LSD-Rumi said:

ichael569 Your thoughts?

it's a difficult topic to answer in a forum post but I'll try to give you my perspective. 

Before synthetic antibiotics were invented, humans have been commonly dying out of infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera and all sorts of bacterial infections that we have now (thanks to antibiotics and other powerful pharmaceuticals) eradicated fairly effectively at least in developed countries. Antibiotics are good at preventing acute mortality from things like appendicitis, pyelonephritis, encephalitis, meningitis and all sorts of other -itis. 

But there is a very strong scientific evidence to point out that antibiotics may be behind the rise of allergies, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmunity and potentially, obesity, diabetes and potentially even depression. Whether antibiotics cause these directly , we don't know but they seem to contribute (alongside other factors) .  This is because the majority of prescribed synthetic antibiotics are broad-spectrum, they target a wide area of gut bacteria and among that havoc is a lot of "friendly fire" and our beneficial colonies are getting damaged. 

Usually, after a single round, this is not an issue and the microbiota can restore itself but it is not uncommon for doctors to put patients on several rounds for things like common colds and flu (I have spoken to people who have been on 10-15 rounds over a few years) and this is a sort of damage that may take 20 years to reverse, if ever. 

On top of that the more antibiotics are used the more resistant the pathogenic bacteria become and this is very very dangerous condition because should the person get something potentially lethal such as pneumonia and have a high degree of antibiotic resistance they could go into acute emergency even coma. 

And so this is when herbal therapies come in play. Herbal antimicrobials are not as powerful but they often spare our microbiome and help to work more gently on the gut. I've used herbal antimicrobials with clients with SIBO and they worked really well alongside other parts of the protocol. 

Personally, I consider human microbiota as another organ in the human body. Any therapy that could harm the delicate balance be it diet, medical therapy or even natural therapy needs to be very carefully managed and the benefits of short term need to be balanced against long term cost of ending up with dysbiosis. This to me is the greatest risk of any dietary routine that restricts dietary fibre such as keto diet or carnivore diet (for other than therapeutic purpose) for some sort of silly goal such as achieving great fitness, six-pack or some sort of metabolic flexibility (whatever the hell that means). Once these diets destroy your microbial balance, health declines quickly 

But sometimes you gotta grab antibiotics when the person has a serious infection and a risk of severe complications. But they should not be prescribed like candy. It is a weapon of mass destruction and with some weapon comes a great responsibility (no jedi pun intended) 

Does that help>? 

[LSD-Rumi]

@Michael569 Thanks for your lenghty answer. Yeah, gut bacteria is almost always ignored by traditional doctors unless it causes a c. Difficle infection. But still why restoring healthy composition of gut bacteria is a difficult process? Shouldn't it be as easy as taking some probioticS OR eating yogurt? 

[Michael569]

22 minutes ago, LSD-Rumi said:

But still why restoring healthy composition of gut bacteria is a difficult process? Shouldn't it be as easy as taking some probioticS OR eating yogurt? 

Because a large portion of microbiota is what we have inherited from our mothers during birth. As the baby passes birth canal it is exposed to variety of bacteria and then there is a reason why the baby's head is tilted towards the anus (i know this sounds will sound a bit gross but nature makes no mistakes) because as the baby passes through, it presses on mom's distal colon (and squeezes it like toothpaste) and traces of poo may come out. This is very common for women to experience this during the birth. As the baby comes out it gets exposed to that as well and the combination of vaginal microbiome as well as mom's colonic microbiome makes the basics of baby's microbial colonies for the rest of the life.

We also know that mother's microbiome dramatically changes weeks before she goes into labour to be able to provide this probiotic bomb to the baby. Secondly as the baby is breast-fed it is exposed to colostrum as well as human milk oligosaccharides (HMO) through the breast milk. Neither we have been able to replicate hence a huge disadvantage of bottle-fed babies

These two (birth and breast feeding exposure) provide such an exotic cocktail of bacteria that nothing we have ever designed comes even close to that. If a prolonged period of antibiotics destroys these colonies that one has been carrying since birth, they are irreplaceable. And now imagine putting a capsule of 10 billion probiotics into where 10 trillion have just been decimated. It's like trying to restore the water in a river that has dried out by pissing into it. It is impossible to get those back. Most of these bacteria we don't even know, we have no probiotics to get them back, most of them cannot be isolated in a product because they are anaerobic and so we can pump in lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium where we know they are easy to manufacture but that's like trying to repopulate a destroyed jungle with pine trees, it gives something back but the diversity is lost forever. We simply have no effective therapies (potentially besides fecal transplantation) to get that diversity back. Maybe over decades that could be done, I don't know...maybe. 

Another issue is that once those colonies are destroyed those places are now free for other bacteria to populate and there is a risk of pathogenic species coming in and setting colonies (this is for example how something like candida can take roots), good bacteria are dead and bad guys come in and silently start spreading. Suddenly the immune system goes in haywire and bam...autoimmune disease has just started. Potentially this could be mitigated by taking huge ass doses of diverse probiotics alongside antibiotics....potentially., we would be taking about hundreds of billions,

So yeah, another long answer  but this is just my opinion take it or leave it. It is possible that somebody more versed into this would disagree but this is coming from work of people who study human microbiota for living, not from me. 

[LSD-Rumi]

@Michael569 Wow such a deep and interesting topic. Sadly, they don't teach us this shit in med school.
Anyways, thanks Michael for your satisfying and lengthy answers.  

Edited October 31, 2021 by LSD-Rumi

[Michael569]

2 hours ago, LSD-Rumi said:

Wow such a deep and interesting topic. Sadly, they don't teach us this shit in med school.
Anyways, thanks Michael for your satisfying and lengthy answers.  

I find the topic of human microbiome ridiculously fascinating subject and it scares me how ready we are to destroy it by drugs, low carb diets, alcohol and junk. Yes medicine is yet to catch up on a lot of this and it will come down to individual students to taking the extra effort and looking into it. I recall a client of mine once told me that her doctor said there is not such thing as microbes in small intestines and I'm like ....

[LSD-Rumi]

11 minutes ago, Michael569 said:

I recall a client of mine once told me that her doctor said there is not such thing as microbes in small intestines and I'm like

stone age doctor be like