PathogenKiller said...
Guardian7 said...
How long should nightlife perpetuate this antibiotic cycle? How many courses is considered too much? That's what I want to know.
'
One course is too much if it is the wrong antibiotic for the problem or if you dont repair the fall out. (Like maybe right now nightlife has an overgrowth of Moraxella Catahrr because it's buddy s.pyogenes was knocked out by the amox.. who knows? Gotta do tests.) But in this case, if he has active strep after 3 courses of abx it isnt something he is just gonna kick on his own. My solution would be stop doing 10 day courses of abx and put him on something longer term then rebuild the gut the best we can with the tools that are available. Your body didnt fix that strep, guarantee it is still lurking in there waiting Guardian especially if you have UC.. not some transient thing they call UC cause it fits the symptomology. Strep and a poor immune system are a perfect storm for something like GAS. Now, that being said.. obviously if you finish a course of abx and you feel sick again, it may not be the same bug, it may be something else.. you should really make sure to get cultured between every course and if you arent responding to the next round of tweaks then things get a bit complicated treatment wise.
Antibiotics arent the devil. even if they precipitate UC (which I also went from IBS to a UC dx after abx). What screwed me wasnt those abx. I needed them. What screwed me is the diet of coke and lean pockets/insert all the fastfood, etc I ate after them because I was a college student raised by parents who never taught me any better and I felt horrible. I could barely function, much less eat any type of healthy diet or take real care of myself. I sure didnt take any probiotics. What also screwed me was the 70 hour work week during that next major flare.... the abx uncovered a problem, but it would have been uncovered anyway in time.
All I know is that I did a year of herbs... the primo, most awesomely molecularly distilled sourced from freaking russian mountain farmers grown on clean mountain streams and air.. yadda yadda... the best. Thank God Im not poor in this screwed up medical system. Ive taken every commercially available and some rx only probiotics.. but seriously. Im so thankful for that 28 days of azithro I took. Id been sick for so long I had no idea you could recover that much functionality.
I actually ended up making a very educated decision to take doxy after the azithro to attack the end of my lab verified pathogens. Energy was the last remaining thing I just couldnt seem to get back. On and then after azithro Ive finally understood how people "do it".. ya know, live busy lives without being miserable. Now that I have energy my moods are so much better. I sleep so much better.. no more brain fog. Anyway, Im not trying to be a poster child for abx because they arent a cure all.. but they are very wonderful tools when used smartly.I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one, as the sum of our experiences define how we feel about
certain things. Antibiotics may very well have saved your life and made it more manageable for you, but they did the exact opposite for me and made my life a living hell for almost a year (and I continue to suffer lingering tendon issues from cipro). I am glad that you are able to live your life now due to them. I did not imply antibiotics were bad. They are grey areas. I have always said that appropriate uses of them will save lives, but this is not always turning out to be the case going by the studies on antibiotic use here.
Many young-ins like myself fell prey to the whole "antibiotics will cure your cold" kind of thing and suffered heavily. Some of these cats are on permanent disability now because of it and I was close to doing it as well. These things could have been prevented by simply not taking the courses, as the studies and data would imply. I am a big fan of preventative action or inaction whenever possible.
And you are right. The only way I was able to "beat" strep was enhance my immunity to newer bounds. I did get cultured and tested for it afterwards. In my particular case, I never had strep in my life and only developed it because of antibiotic use. Each subsequent course of antibiotics makes it very difficult for our immune system to fight off things. That was the surprising part to me throughout the whole crisis because I ended up developing mystery problem after mystery problem after the courses.
If I had been in some other country, this would have never happened because of better guidelines, but I have to deal with it now. When Dr.Martin Blaser warned of the antibiotic nuclear winter, he wasn't kidding. Every new study that's coming out on antibiotic abuse and its repercussions makes me regret those pills I blindly put into my mouth. I would have been better off taking rat poison and the antidote to that. There's no antidote to carpet bombing billions of bacterial colonizes that determine our immunity, unfortunately.
But that is how I feel and this is just my opinion on them.
Take care now.