Lots of antibiotic use harms microbiome

That’s what happened to me. Lots of antibiotic use in childhood harms. It sets people up for chronic illness and further pharmaceutical drug injury. It’s likely that this sort of uncritical overuse of antibiotics sets up a lot of people for further harm, impacting them for the rest of their lives. (antibiotic use harms)

There has been lots of news about the importance of healthy gut bacteria lately. I’m taking the latest mention of this in the LA Times and Wired both to reiterate something I’ve been talking about since this blogs inception. Gut health is important to our total wellbeing! Antibiotics are perhaps the biggest insult to a healthy gut out there, but our diets in general too are very important. Our diets, in fact, can also help reestablish healthy gut flora and therefore better health.

From the LA Times a few days ago:

In recent years, scientists have developed a growing appreciation for the “microbiome,” the collection of mostly useful bacteria that help us digest food, metabolize key nutrients and ward off invading pathogens. Investigators have cataloged thousands of these organisms through the National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, begun in 2008.

Blaser is interested in why so many bacteria have colonized the human body for so long – the simple fact that they have strongly suggests that they serve some useful purpose. But these bacteria have come under attack in the last 80 or so years thanks to the development of antibiotics. The drugs certainly deserve some of the credit for extending the U.S. lifespan, Blaser notes – a baby born today can expect to live 78 years, 15 years longer than a baby born in 1940. But in many respects, an antibiotic targets a particular disease the way a nuclear bomb targets a criminal, causing much collateral damage to things you’d rather not destroy.

“Antibiotics kill the bacteria we do want, as well as those we don’t,” Blaser writes. “Sometimes, our friendly flora never fully recover.”

And that can leave us more susceptible to various kinds of diseases, especially considering that the typical American is exposed to 10 to 20 antibiotics during childhood alone. Blaser points out that the rise (let along overuse) of antibiotics coincides with dramatic increases in the prevalence of allergies, asthma, Type 1 diabetes, obesity and inflammatory bowel disease. (read more)

And from Wired Magazine too:

It’s an accepted concept by now that taking antibiotics in order to quell an infection disrupts the personal microbiome, the population of microorganisms that we all carry around in our guts, and which vastly outnumbers the cells that make up our bodies. That recognition supports our understanding of Clostridium difficile disease — killing the beneficial bacteria allows C. diff room to surge and produce an overload of toxins — as well as the intense interest in establishing a research program that could demonstrate experimentally whether the vast industry producing probiotic products is doing what it purports to do.

But implicit in that concept is the expectation that, after a while — after a course of antibiotics ends — the gut flora repopulate and their natural balance returns.

What if that expectation were wrong? read the rest

Wired asks whether it’s possible to get the original flora back and the answer may very well be no, but it is possible to repopulate the gut with other beneficial bacteria, but there’s been little systemic study about how to do it and if one does not go about doing it ON PURPOSE it won’t just come back on it’s own. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that one can heal the gut at least in large part if one knows how to eat and supplement appropriately.  

Certainly we can stand to learn more about this and more research is needed.

I was given multiple courses of antibiotics as a child. I was even on them for 2 straight years for (mild!!) acne! Antibiotics were gravely abused in my lifetime and I do believe they set me up for the chronic illness I am now facing as a result of  the psychiatric drug injury . Nonetheless, having become aware of the gut being an important issue, given that I had severe irritable bowel syndrome at one time, I’ve been working on healing my gut for several years now.

These two books teach how to help get the gut flora back in order that one might become healthy again. And these two doctors think that almost ALL chronic disease processes can be helped by healing the gut flora.

• The Body Ecology Diet: Recovering Your Health and Rebuilding Your Immunity

  

• Gut and Psychology Syndrome — this provided an invaluable foundation that I’ve tweaked for many years. I did have to go far afield to get what has been working for me but its still one of my favorite approaches.

I had initially healed my IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) with knowledge about gut health a few years ago. Since I discovered the above two authors I’ve gone deeper and gotten more improvement. Being that I’m profoundly ill the changes are still slow, but I got undeniable improvements after switching to a radical gut healing diet that remained, even while some of them retreated as well. I continue on.

When people have been ill for many years (some of us really for most of our lives) it can in turn take many years to regain health. The good news is with attention most people can regain their health. Gut health for many of us is a central part of the picture.

I’m now doing this process that allows for that deeper healing. 

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Update 2024: IBS is a catch-all term for many diverse gut problems that have some similar symptoms. When I wrote this piece, I had stopped having diarrhea for the first time in about 20 years. I didn’t understand how much more work I had to do to truly heal my gut. The victory at the point I wrote this piece was real, but it was only the beginning, and I did not know that. I have lots of other posts on the microbiome and chronic infections, which often have the symptoms that get called IBS involved. If you’re dealing with chronic issues of any kind those posts might be helpful. See: microbiome posts

It’s taken years of study and experimentation to get to the point where this next step was the obvious one to take.

Microbiome chaos has taken many years to address and the drug damage did things to the microbiome in the larger body that I didn’t understand at all when I posted this. No one understood then and now any understanding is still in infancy

NOTE: I’ve learned a lot from all these diets. None of it was wasted time, still ~~ This collection has been growing for many years with this website… All diets are bullsh*t  serves as a critique and caveat.  I needed to do it and don’t regret it. I also don’t feel the same way about diet as I did when I first started seeking answers. Also visit this category page: DIET

For more on that history and lots of info that remains helpful see:
Nutrition and gut health, mental health and diet

2025 – Lots more info on microbiome on the site since this was first posted. See:

• The microbiome and healing diets
• Lyme disease / systemic infections (systemic microbiome imbalances are the norm among those with chronic illness)

More articles on GUT HEALING

and on the microbiome

and on healing with whole food

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