If not for getting sick recently I'd probably still be dealing with whatever gut infection I had that the doctors essentially ignored.
5-6 years ago my buddy and I got violently ill on a trip to Japan. Both agreed it's the sickest either of us have ever been, and we both lost 15-20lbs each. Shortly after our illnesses went away we both developed digestion issues. Went through stool samples and colonoscopies. He got diagnosed with uc and I got diagnosed with post-infectious ibs-d. Was told all tests were fine, but life since was hell. That is up until 2 months ago when I went to the ER with an infection.
Was given 2 weeks of doxycycline and voila, I'm no longer scared to fart, not running to the bathroom after eating anything, not going 7 times a day, and having solid stools. Might be tmi but whatever this is something that I'm happy and feel incredibly relieved (no pun intended) about.
Only problem is I still have what I went to the ER for, no one knows what it is, and I have to get another colonoscopy :/
I've personally had quite some experiences navigating health issues, health anxiety, the medical system, etc. Nothing terribly interesting, but, still. I'm actually in middle of scheduling tests to see if I might, in fact, have an autoimmune condition. If they do find evidence of that, then it will have taken me around 6 years to figure it out from my very first symptoms. Thanks to modern medical science, I have little reason to sweat over it, though. (Of course, I'm still hoping for a negative, but at least in the case of a positive I can have the relief of knowing what the hell was wrong with me all this time.)
Now I have to go through the entire process again to rule out everything else before getting a fibromyalgia diagnosis.
Anyway antibiotics have unrelatedly literally saved my life on several occasions now and I am glad that in a few emergencies I was able to access them on the street without needing to navigate the healthcare system. Antibiotics are too tightly controlled for humans and not enough for animals.
That said, I have had to take them enough that I've definitely experienced negative gut effects a couple of times. Now I reach for probiotics after a regimen.
I'll have to take probiotics the rest of my life. Because I'm not doing a fecal transplant, thanks. Those three times of antibiotics completely wrecked my intestines.
"Antibiotics damage the colonic mucus barrier in a microbiota-independent manner"
Why?
This way they get the benefit of complaining about their suffering without criticism because it's a social faux pas to tell a person to undergo a medical procedure just as much as it's frowned upon to mock someone for suffering from a medical illness, even though the fix for their medical condition is getting an enema and sticking a couple of pills up their hee-hoo.
https://openbiome.org/feature/fecal-transplant-pills-large-s...
There are non-absorbable antibiotics designed to target intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It’s hit or miss, though.
Unfortunately for many people, taking antibiotics can have the opposite effect where it creates or worsens gut problems. It’s not an easy or reliable solution.
.dressed chicken .peanuts .soyabean oil .cumin
And we used to use these food "daily".
The allergy eruptions, digestive issues went from 100 to 5 starting next day.
This is such a small thing to check but it has saved us as a lot of trouble.
And I'm curious, did all of your family find yourselves allergic or sensitive to all of those things, or is that list a combination that covers everyone while each individual was allergic to one or a few of them?
Dressed chicken, I meant to say broiler chicken. They are raised for the sole purpose of meat and the turnaround time is in 45 days or less now. They pump these birds full of lots of medication, vaccines and stuff. Everyone in the family gets sick eating them. OTOH, farm chicken that are naturally grown and have no medication is fine so its not chicken per se but maybe some medication or food given to these broiler chicken
It cleaned up my infection, and I didn’t have any side effects —- but hard to shift illnesses can require significant amounts of antibiotics with significant side effects.
From my understanding it's much less common to get antibiotics in the UK vs US.
I've had 4 infections this year, including an ear infection, fingernail, chest (that caused pneumonia on my son) and one that caused my left eye to swell up.
I received no antibiotics for any of them, just a suggestion that if they didn't go away they might prescribe some. They all got better without them (except my son, who ended up in emergency and was given two different ones which cleared up his infection rapidly).
In the past though I'm pretty sure I would have been prescribed them immediately.
It used to be that they were prescribed much more freely, because on the level of an individual case it's unlikely to do any harm and might help speed up getting better, and it was an easy way for doctors to make patients feel cared for to send them off with a prescription. But sensibly that's been course corrected now.
A related problem though is how hard it is to get an appointment with a doctor now. This is essentially why my son ended up in emergency.
Maybe they tried something broad spectrum here, and what was necessary (and required the sequencing to know what it actually was) was something more targeted.
One example of the guidance: https://elearning.rcgp.org.uk/pluginfile.php/199275/mod_book...
You know how everyone complains about antibiotic resistance? Yeah, they're not going to give some random antibiotic if they have no idea what something might be.
Modern medical ethics requires you always prioritise the individual over society, which means one should always give antibiotics if the benefits outweigh the downsides for this specific patient, even if that means you might cause antibiotic resistance for everyone else in the future.
Unfortunately not necessarily. For many chronic conditions an individual may very well develop an antibiotic resistant bug. There's even plenty on YouTube about standard penicillins and strep bacteria that start growing right inside the antibiotics. Look it up, it's fascinating.
You're assuming (and indeed US medicine seems to assume this everywhere) that since there don't usually seem to be major negative side effects from antibiotics they're harmless. However we are now confident they're not - lots of interesting things live inside us and whether or not they can cope with antibiotics varies, we're an ecosystem and so this intervention is a massive change to that ecosystem, and while it will usually be justifiable if we know there's an infection if we don't know that's now a gamble.
You don't get to complain about antibiotic resistance if at the first sign of an issue you demand a bathing in random antibiotics, especially if you don't even know if you have a bacterial infection in the first place
Antibiotic resistance could just as easily first happen in the sewers and other places where there is a lowish concentration of antibiotics.
The prisoner would undoubtedly have a better life if not imprisoned. But society does better if they are imprisoned.