My daughter ended up damaged FEET from taking Cipro from a crazy writing MD here in LA area. My grandgirl knows this doctor mentioned here and hopefully he can help Jen with all the damage done. https://regenerativemedicinela.com/fluoroquinolone-toxicity/
Cipro was in high demand when all those anthrax letters were going around. I was prescribed it once due to a severe colon infection, but stopped taking it pretty quickly due to one of the more severe side-effects (made my urine purple.) I forget what the substitute was. This was probably 20 years ago, and my doc then was pretty conservative. So what caused the doc to prescribe Cipro in the first place? It's a pretty strong antibiotic.
The stupid drug writer was out of medical school only a short time....that's what we found out later...we all even went to an malpractice atty as she also lost a lot of hearing.....she trusted the Fer and she's so damaged...
Cipro and others in the same family are good antibiotics when used properly. They have the advantage of a broad spectrum that penetrates tissues well. The down side is the the side effects--mostly tendon and ligament damage--must be closely managed. I don't know why it was used for a colon infection unless nothing else worked, but you said it was 20 years ago when the severity of the side effects was not fully known.
My understanding is that cipro and another antibiotic were used because of their strength, so that once they went through my digestive system, there was still some effectiveness left to treat that infection in my colon/lower intestine.
I just found this OTC abx supplement and looks good. I truly believe abx drugs are overused and wrongly used....so many don't take probiotics when taking them for starters... https://www.lifesourcevitamins.com/antibiotic-all-natural-antibiotics-90-caps-p-p/anti001.htm
I have read that taking any oral antibiotic changes your intestinal biota forever. You cannot get it back to what it was, but you can sure improve it with probiotics.
This is another interesting topic, since no one seems to know for certain what happens in each individual's gut. I guess I'll discuss it here, since we're discussing "all things antibiotic." When I had my most recent colonoscopy, the doctor's assistant recommended a brand of probiotics that had 4 strains in it. I opted for a brand that had 12 strains. I took it for a few months or so, but was concerned that I might be populating my system with strains that are not "native to me" (or are in the wrong ratios), and that I might be crowding out strains that my system should naturally have...there's absolutely no way to really know. So I stopped taking them and trusted my system to re-balance itself, to the extent such re-balancing were required. I noticed no difference before, during or after taking them. As an aside, I've mentioned that I'm taking vinegar with "the mother," and read on one site that organic unfiltered unpasteurized cider vinegar "contains 96 strains," but there is debate over whether it contains probiotics, prebiotics, or neither. Regarding antibiotics: I'm cautious of taking them, but have done so at least a couple of times when I was a kid and perhaps 4-5 times as an adult. There are few alternatives when you're in distress. If they have temporarily or permanently harmed my gut, I've not noticed in either a contemporaneous or a long-term mode. Perhaps my ability to extract nutrients from my food (or other gut function) has been affected to some degree, but I've not had significant G.I. distress or signs of any deficiencies except for that period when I was in my early 60s. I used to do tons of bike riding and racquetball playing and other stuff over a period of years, apparently fully-functioning. But again, there's no way to really measure gut activity that I'm aware of. Perhaps this has changed since I last read about it about 5 years ago. It's all rather fascinating. It would be interesting to test/investigate people who have never taken an antibiotic (probably some remote tribe), if that would be possible.
I think everyone's gut biome is unique to them and not exactly like any other person's, as it has been formed by what you have eaten, where it was grown and where it was raised. When we raised livestock, we always gave any antibiotics we used by injection or, occasionally by IV, because we did not want to disturb the balance in their gut, plus it was easy to make sure they got the dose. If you have ever tried to get a pet to take a pill, you know what I mean. I believe the comment I mentioned in the previous post was from a study that was done on a number of people's quantitative stool cultures over a period of time. Occasionally, people's gut flora get so screwed up that it becomes a threat to their health. In those cases, the sometimes kill off the biome completely and resort to stool "transfusions" from a volunteer donor who has really good, healthy flora. I know it sounds gross, but the technique is used to save lives. I also think you don't necessarily want your food to be too clean. You don't want pathogens obviously, but a little dirt helps build healthy gut flora.
I was gonna mention different genes, different cultures, different foods, peoples who never ate anything that was fermented, etc. There's so much that goes on in there...acid, enzymes, bacteria. And it adapts to what we consume (and what we don't consume.) I mention that I temporarily lost the ability to digest beef when I went meatless for a period of time...it hurt bad. Was it you who posted that our stool contains a significant amount of bacteria, or did I read it elsewhere (I'm thinking well over 25% by volume)? I was shocked when I read that. I would never had thought that loosing that much bacteria on a daily basis would have been anything but harmful. (I would never have thought that we could make that much bacteria.) But now that I remember that fact, testing the bacterial content of stool as one measure of gut health makes sense.
I don't think I posted anything about the quantity of bacteria, but the gut carries a lot of bacteria and they make a lot of our vitamins and probably a lot of other factors we haven't identified yet. A majority of our immune system is related to the gut, and the ironic thing is that, biologically, all that is outside our bodies, as the gut contents are considered anatomically outside our bodies.
Amazing stuff. Here's a VOX article that discusses 9 facts about poop, including some of the things we've put forth here: #1 states that 50%-80% of poop [excluding water] is bacteria--good and bad--living and dead¹. #9 discusses poop transplants. The other 7 facts are quite fascinating (such as why much of the non-Western world has little need to wipe.) But bringing it sorta back to topic...since bacteria play such an important role in our immune systems and in our overall health, one does have to wonder about the ramifications of how their mass-execution by antibiotics affects things. (One also wonders about the natural antibiotics that some cultures consume...like garlic--and how that affects things.) And what do you do when you need them? It's not a matter of over-use, if a single dose can forever change things. ¹For the curious, poop is generally 75% water, making bacteria 12%-20% of its total bulk.
Very interesting article, and a good refresher for me. Thanks. I once had a professor who stated that we can live with a sterile gut (like Bubble Boy), but once we have an intestinal biome, we cannot live without it. It seems to be true.
Not just our system, but ALL the systems. That is why I cannot understand any scientist thinking that it all happened by accident. There has to be a creator of some kind behind it all.