What they are finding as the positives in favor of the antibiotics short course:
- Over the years we have been increasingly cornered into finding stronger and even stronger antibiotics to combat the increasingly resistant bacteria populations.
- This reality translates into three problems:
- Antibiotics have become more and more expensive with more and more research and development and production costs behind them. The cost to individuals for these medicines has risen to a level of prohibitiveness.
- As antibiotics become more powerful medicines, adverse reactions and complications in patients are on the rise.
- Forced resistance (see above). It’s true. We develop antibiotics to face the ever-more resistant bacteria population, forcing stronger even more resistant bacteria to emerge…and so the cycle continues, round and round, year after year.
- Research studies have shown:
- Patients with pneumonia in a hospital study were divided into two groups after three days of intravenous amoxicillin. The control group received no further antibiotic treatment while the second group continued for seven more days. By the end of the ten days about 89% of the patients in both groups had been cured of their lung infections.
- Studies on skin infection treated with antibiotics showed similar percentage comparisons after three days and then ten, with one group receiving placebo for the last seven days and one continuing with antibiotic treatment.
- A study of a short course of oral antibiotics for early Lyme disease showed it can be cured in the majority of cases and for those patients who after being treated have lingering symptoms such as fatigue and cognitive impairment, studies comparing a standard 90 days of intravenous then oral antibiotic treatment to placebo showed improvement in the fatigue factor in one study but no cognitive improvements in the others.
- Can we assume/deduce then that the short course protocol will leave behind ‘good’ helpful bacteria too that will become stronger, proliferate more, giving us more protection and a bigger fighting force against pathogens?
So it is not 100% decided. Pay attention to your own signs and symptoms and how you recover. Let’s keep our medicine cabinets properly filled (as we learn more and more in our blog about natural and TCM home remedies) and ready for proper treatments. Let’s become confident about how to take care of us!
More to learn. More to follow…