Most people, if asked to identify a pharmaceutical drug that was "safe and effective", would point to antibiotics. So is this announcement more good news for antibiotic drugs?
"A new antibiotic uses a never-before-seen mechanism to deliver a direct hit on tough-to-treat infections while leaving beneficial microbes alone. The strategy could lead to a new class of antibiotics that attack dangerous bacteria in a powerful new way, overcoming current drug resistance while sparing the gut microbiome".
This is how it is presented in this Medscape article, New-Era Double Selective Antibiotic Spares Microbiome. But hold on, what is this about "sparing the gut microbiome"? What is the gut microbiome?
" The gut microbiome refers to all the microorganisms living in the digestive system. The microbiome is individual to each person and is important to digestive health as well as to overall health. Studies of the gut microbiome are ongoing, but it’s becoming clear that certain types of bacteria, yeast, and other fungi are more or less beneficial for overall health. People may be able to affect their microbiome with diet and other lifestyle factors".
So it certainly does seem important to 'spare' the microorganisms of the gut microbiome. But wait, does that mean that all previous antibiotic drugs attacked it, harmed it? Rather than being 'good news' is this an admission that hitherto antibiotics have actually harmed something that was "important to digestive health as well as to overall health"?
Over 9 years ago, in 2015, I wrote a blog, "Antibiotics. Not as safe as we have been told?", which outlined just how harmful antibiotics drugs were to our health, outlining some of the known/accepted, and the suspected adverse reactions to antibiotics.
- The blog touched on the fact that conventional medicine was aware of the harm antibiotics caused, as early as 1953 (4 years after their introduction).
- It talked about antibacterial resistance.
- It outlined how antibiotics were particularly harmful to the health of children.
- And antibiotics were discussed as the possible or known causes of a variety of diseases, such as obesity, irritable bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, liver disease, diabetes, asthma and eczema, heart disease, mental health, and HIV/Aids.
- All these diseases have risen to epidemic levels during the last 70 years, no doubt in large part to antibiotic drugs that have compromised our gut microbiome.
- And I asked this important question - did the conventional medical establishment know about the patient harm that was being caused by antibiotic drugs?
Clearly they did, and the development of this new 'double selective' antibiotic is proof of this. Why else would it have been developed, presumably at massive cost?
Yet during the last 9 years, the list of iatrogenic diseases now known to be/thought to be caused by antibiotic drugs have increased to many that seem to have little or no connection with the gut, like Parkinson's Disease.
Suddenly, conventional medicine seems to have realised that killing microbes is not a path to health! Hence the new drug. As usual it is hailed as a breakthrough - but the 'bad' news underlying the 'good' news is being ignored, or censored - presumably for 'commercial' reasons!
The new 'double selective' antibiotics may, or may not be safer and more effective than the 'old' antibiotics (that is, those that are prescribed, and still being taken in huge quantities today). But we can be sure that if conventional medicine continues to operate with the secrecy, and lack of transparency, we have witnessed for the last 70 years, we will probably not be aware of this for yet another 70 years!
Natural medical therapies have known about the harm caused by antibiotics for a very long time. They do not believe in the 'germ' theory of illness. They do not set out to attack or kill anything! And this is why natural medicine focuses instead on supporting and strengthening our immune system - in the knowledge that it is our natural immunity that best protects us all from illness and disease.