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Friday 10 August 2018

The importance of our Microbiome. It keeps us healthy.

Our human bodies live alongside bacteria and microbes. They can be found living in every part of the human body. It's been estimated that there are over 1 trillion living with us, especially in our gastrointestinal track. Here these micro-organisms are known as the microbiome, and their importance in the regulation of our digestive system is now increasingly realised. We now know that they protect us from illness and disease-causing, and they help us to develop a strong immune system.

Yet in conventional medical circles, whenever bacteria and viruses are mentioned, they are associated with disease. They cause disease. They are not considered to be our friends and allies. Conventional medicine has long believed this to be so, since the days of Pasteur, and over the years powerful pharmaceutical drugs (antibiotic and antiviral drugs) have been developed to wage war on them. The intention is kill them.

Until fairly recently medical science had a limited sense of the importance of the microbiome. It is only now beginning to appreciate its role in human health. The billions of bacteria not only share the human body, but play a crucial part in the way it functions.

Moreover, the human microbiome is now thought to be closely linked to an individual's genetic footprint, to play a role in the determination of our DNA, our predisposition to pathogens, our hereditary traits, our body type, and much more. And it is thought that up to 90% of all human illnesses are intimately linked to the content of the microbiome.

So medical science is at last looking at how the health of the microbiome is best maintained, and what factors promote and compromise its health. Unfortunately it is hindered in how close it can investigate this. It can look at the importance of lifestyle factors, especially our diet, what we eat and don't eat because this plays an important role in maintaining our gut bacteria. It can look at exercise, on smoking and other lifestyle factors

Yet medical science will not be able to focus on the impact that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines have on the microbiome.

Conventional medicine have hitherto assumed that germs are unhealthy! During the last 70 years, in particular, it has developed and prescribed pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that have literally declared open warfare on germs. Antibiotic drugs kill bacteria. Antiviral drugs kill viruses. And this warfare goes beyond medicine. We use antibacterial soaps and shampoos. Our kitchens are full of chemicals whose task is to kill germs. Pesticides and herbicides wage war on almost everything, finding its way into the air we breath, and the food we eat.

Yet the fact is that we have to live in co-opeation with bacteria and viruses. After decades trying to destroy them, indiscriminately, because conventional medicine believed they caused disease medical science is beginning to understand their importance.

Nor is it just antibiotics and antivirals that have been the culprits. Most drugs are taken by mouth and so pass directly to the stomach. Painkillers, mouthwashes, antacids, and laxatives and many other drugs, all of them toxic, have the ability to kill and disrupt our micro biome.

Pharmaceutical drugs can overwhelm our immune system, our natural defence against illness and disease. Now it is being recognised that a variety of diseases, including many diseases whose incidence is rapidly expanding, are being associated with an unhealthy gut.

     * Autism. It has been known since Andrew Wakefield first discovered in the 1990's that the microbiome in autistic children differs from normal, health children.
     * Alzheimers Disease. the magazine, What Doctors Don't Tell Use (WDDTY August 2018) outlines how problems with the gut may contribute to dementia
     * Auto-Immune Disease, in all its many forms, is now thought to arise from intestinal bacteria which can influence inflammatory immune reactions that start in the gut.
     * Diabetes is now thought to be brought about by a "notable change" in gut bacteria.
     * Obesity can be caused by an unhealthy micro biome as it is unable to reduce the accumulation of fat and inflammation.
     * Mental Health. Questions are even being raised that some mental health conditions are caused, or worsened, by an unhealthy gut. WDDTY August 2018 also outlines how an unhealthy microbiome can contribute to depression and anxiety.

My website, the "Disease Inducing Effects" of Drugs and Vaccines (DIE's), lists the pharmaceutical drugs that are known to cause specific illnesses and diseases. The new recognition of the importance of the microbiome probably supplies us with one of the 'working mechanisms' for the damage they do to patients - that they alter and damage the micro biome leading to ill-health.

Medical science will have a problem with this. It has been intimately involved in the testing and approval of pharmaceutical drugs that is doing damage to our microbiome.  So whilst they may tell us to stop smoking, to get more exercise, and to eat more sensibly, they will struggle to acknowledge the damage being done by the drugs and vaccines they have approved.

Criticising pharmaceutical drugs is to criticise themselves!

My DIE's website demonstrates that conventional medicine consistently fails to recognise the importance of pharmaceutical drugs in causing disease. The fact that they cause disease is admitted, not least in the doctor's 'bibles', the British National Formulary and MIMS. But it is rarely admitted when speaking to patients about what has caused their illness.

So if pharmaceutical companies are ruining our microbiome, if they are making us sick, what is their response likely to be?
               * Will they warn us about the dangers of taking their drugs?
               * Will they develop drugs that do less damage to gut health?

The answer is that they will do neither. Reduced drug sales is contrary to their business plan! The pharmaceutical industry causes illness and disease with the drugs and vaccines (they call them side effects), then they produce more drugs for the patients they have made sick in the first place. It is a time-honoured strategy routinely adopted, and the conventional medical establishment will plan to do so again in this situation.

Medical science is already responding. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's journal published in March 2015 an article entitled "Drug metabolism: manipulating the microbiome; understanding how symbiotic bacteria that help maintain health interact with medicines is an emerging field of research". So patients can look out for yet more drug developments. For instance, have a look at this website, which proudly states that medical scientists now recognise that a compromised gut leads to a variety of conditions "ranging from allergies to anxiety to cancer", although it does not recognise the responsibility of pharmaceutical drugs in compromising it in the first place! What they are interested in doing is developing new drugs.

               "They are increasingly interested in drugging (the microbiomes) constituents. Two teams of US scientists have already tested those drugs in mice, and pharmaceutical companies are paying close attention. The hope is that by delivering drugs to the microbiome, researchers will be able to treat or prevent some of our most intractable diseases."

Medical science is clever! They know how to out-think and out-perform the body's own defence system!

               "Today there are crude ways to medicate the microbiome. Antibiotics kill bacteria broadly; probiotics add additional bacteria in. The gut drugs under development, on the other hand, are precisely targeted and nonlethal. They don’t aim to change the number of microbes, but rather their behavior."

The article goes on to describe their cleverness, how Dr. Stanley Hazen, a physician and researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, has decided to try to disrupt our microbiome, how they have searched for molecules that "would block choline receptors of microbes".

So our body does not know what it is doing, but not to worry, medical science does, and it will correct it for us! The article goes on to explain how another scientist is targeting gut microbes for a different purpose - to prevent the nausea caused by chemotherapy drugs. Again, one drug causes a problem, and another drug is designed to deal with the problem. His logic is similar.

               “You’re not killing the bacteria. You’re just telling the bacteria, ‘You can’t eat this.”

The latter scientist is apparently researching ways to minimise the side effects of other drugs, like Ibuprofen, which is known to cause intestinal ulcers. The article describes the interest and excitement of many pharmaceutical companies with the prospect of developing promising new drugs for treating gut diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes and central nervous system disorders.

Conventional medicine has not plans to stop meddling with our bodies, 
regardless of the effects it might have on our health