Big Pharma loves nothing better than an all-purpose drug: statins for cholesterol but also for heart disease, HRT for menopause but also for Alzheimer’s, Ozempic for diabetes but also for weight loss and God knows what else.
But of all the drugs out there used for multiple purposes, the prom queen by far is antibiotics.
Now, I profess a special interest here. I owe my life to them. If my mother hadn’t had antibiotics as a young woman, she would have died, and I never would have been born.
In 1942, when my mother was 24, her dentist unwisely extracted a wisdom tooth while she had the flu. Within days her neck ballooned with a streptococcus infection, and she was rushed to the hospital. My father, then her fiancé, wept helplessly at her bedside while a priest filed past him after administering the last rites.
And then the wonder drug arrived. As a last resort, my mother was given penicillin, still in experimental use then. Within a day or two, the swelling that had almost obscured her face simply melted away. My ordinarily doubting father rushed off to church and humbly knelt before the altar, convinced that he’d witnessed a miracle.
In those early days, antibiotics were being tested to combat deadly bacterial infections. As a result of the work of Alexander Fleming and others, penicillin began to be used gingerly during the Second World War against such life-threatening illnesses as septicemia, meningitis and pneumonia. There is perhaps no other family of drugs that has so revolutionized—indeed defined—modern medicine.
In fact, through 35 years of my writing about health, antibiotics are still the only drugs on the market I can think of that can actually cure something rather than simply making the patient more comfortable or trying to prevent the condition from getting worse. (I don’t count Ozempic for weight loss as a ‘cure.’)
At your next dinner party, try playing the following game: challenge everyone around the table to produce a single drug that can cure people of an illness, other than antibiotics. If you come up with anything, stop whatever you’re doing immediately and call me.
Nevertheless, fast-forward some 80 years to today, and the last century’s wonder drug has become one of the most abused substances in modern medicine. What was once reserved for life-threatening illnesses such as lobar pneumonia is now routinely handed out at the surgery for athlete’s foot or colds—anytime a benign infection is suspected or even might one day develop.
Up until now, unnecessary antibiotics were thought to cause only a tummy upset or a reaction in the approximately 5 percent of those truly allergic to them. But a growing body of evidence shows that repeated courses of antibiotics can so disturb a person’s internal ecology that it begins a disease process potentially ending in myalgic encephalitis, diabetes or even cancer.
Certainly, in the 80 years since the drugs healed my mother, both doctors and patients have become well aware of antibiotic resistance. But what most people don’t know is that antibiotic resistance is killing people.
Some three-quarters of a million people die every year due to antibiotic resistance, and the World Health Organization predicts that figure will multiply more than 10 times in the next 25 years.
But more astonishing is the number of people whose health is irrevocably damaged by taking antibiotics. Various antibiotics have been linked to jaundice, type 2 diabetes in children and adults, certain forms of colitis, liver cell death, psychiatric conditions like anxiety and depression, psychotic episodes, even hearing loss and anaphylactic shock.
The key reason has to do with perhaps the key to all diseases: the state of a person’s gut. Some 38 trillion cells of “good guy” bacteria live in our gut, and that number comprises more than a thousand different strains. Each are linked in some way to the state of our health.
The purpose of any antibiotic is to kill bacterial cells or stop them from reproducing. Although many newer types of antibiotics are developed to target a narrower spectrum, including only specific types of bacteria, most of those taken are “broad spectrum,” meaning they blast away at bacteria indiscriminately, decimating the gut population.
The bottom line is that antibiotics can save your life—they saved my mother’s life, which enabled her to go on and have me. But so can numerous natural antibiotics.
Naturopath Harald Gaier, one of our editorial board members, broke his leg once and contracted MRSA in the hospital. Doctors gave him antibiotics, which did nothing to fight the antibiotic-resistant bug.
As an herbal specialist, he knew what to do. He asked his wife to bring Berberis vulgaris and Goldenseal to the hospital in a Lucozade bottle, and he alternated taking them daily. Within a few weeks, he was cured. In a second visit to the hospital, he contracted MRSA again, and again his cocktail worked in comprehensively eliminating the bugs.
David Needleman, a homeopathic pharmacist who writes a column in What Doctors Don’t Tell You, the magazine I co-edit, cured his abscessed tooth by taking a special homeopathic combination remedy (Narayani Mix 35) for several weeks.
Save antibiotics for life-and-death situations (and use prebiotic foods and probiotics before and after taking them). For the rest of the time, consider herbs, homeopathic remedies and other substances that will kill bacterial bugs without also killing you.
To find out more about this and other natural ways to heal, check out my health magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You: www.wddty.com
