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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I had a bacterial infection (chronic) lately and was thinking of doing biochemistry as there was no cure in the market for my infection. Surprisingly, honey did a lot more than any class of antibiotics that I tried.

Can I reach you by email?

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I use honey along with something called the specific-carbohydrate diet to control (but not eradicate) an infection in my gut.

Certain honeys -- and not particularly the more expensive ones -- are much more antibacterial in this regard than others.

I also thought of natural antibiotics like honey or garlic as substitutions, but I also thought that they would only help with gut infections (e.g. no use for infected hip joint after transplant) - is that not so?

I'm using it with my eyes and it's helping my blepharitis more than steroid and antibiotics did. I don't have deep biochemistry knowledge, but I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios.

> I guess they already tried to find out the antibiotics properties of honey/garlic and it didn't help much in real scenarios.

Speaking more generally, there is limited interest from big pharma in the use of natural or herbal products because they will have to spend a ton of money on clinical trials to prove effectiveness, but they won't get the patent protection necessary to recoup the cost of R&D, like they would with synthetic drugs.

I've dreamed about doing an app for crowd-sourced clinical trials. Obviously something like this wouldn't have the level of control as having participants under direct supervision, but it could be close to free if done right.

They just change one atom in the big ole organic molecule that doesn't change the effectiveness, and boom: new and patentable drug.

Presumably you'd then have many more possible patentable, innocuously "different" molecule patterns, ruining the competitive edge.

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