Health Minute: Antibiotic Dangers
Are they helping or harming?
Antibiotics are among the most frequently prescribed and taken medications. I am amazed at the rather nonchalant attitude most of my clients have regarding having recently taken an antibiotic for some infection — it’s kind of like that’s just what you do when you have a sinus infection or whatever, like doesn’t everybody do this?
Well, as a matter of fact everybody doesn’t take antibiotics every time they get an infection! I probably last had an antibiotic when I was college and didn’t know any better. As my clients learn the dangers of antibiotics and the natural medicine alternatives to taking them, they too find at least the routine usage of antibiotics to become a thing of the past.
WHAT ARE ANTIBIOTICS?
Antibiotics are drugs that kill or inhibit infectious organisms. Originally they were organic compounds made from bacteria or molds, though today most are synthetic. Louis Pasteur is credited with discovering the “antibiotic effect” during the 19th century. However, most people associate the beginning of antibiotic therapy with Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in 1928. Difficulties in purification and other technical aspects of making antibiotics caused them to not come into routine usage until the 1950’s. The post World War II generations have largely grown up with antibiotics.
Types of antibiotics include the penicillins (ampicillin, amoxicillin), cephalosporin, aminoglycosides, tetracyclines, macrolides (erythromysin), and sulfonamides.
BENEFITS OF ANTIBIOTICS
I would be the last one to deny that antibiotic drugs have saved many lives, and thus been a wonderful medical discovery. Diseases that once ravaged the population, such as tuberculosis and pneumonia, have significantly less mortality today because of antibiotics. For life-threatening infections, antibiotics are highly appropriate.
PROBLEMS OF ANTIBIOTICS
The basic problem with antibiotics is summed up in the etymology of the word itself — “antibiotic” means “anti-life.” Antibiotics not only kill the “bad” bacteria, but also the “good” bacteria in our digestive tracts that comprise an integral part of our immune systems. While the antibiotic is seemingly “solving” your current infection, in reality it is setting you up for repeated infections, which your compromised immune system will have greater difficulty handling.
Think of it this way: Imagine yourself the general of an army, facing an opposing army in battle. Your advisers tell you that you can quickly and simply destroy the opposing army by nuking them. However, there is one slight drawback — you will also destroy a significant percentage of your own army while annihilating the enemy.
Any general that agreed to that strategy would undoubtedly be court-martialed. Yet no one seems to want to “court martial” the medical doctors that routinely use antibiotics, and in so doing destroy their patient’s natural immune systems, their own “army,” if you will. It becomes a basic, “At what price victory?” question.
In Health and Wholeness,
Leah Kline
CNC, Health and Wholeness Coach