Read Online Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria by Stephen Harrod Buhner - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Harrod Buhner
Tags: Medical, Health & Fitness, Healing, Alternative Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Herbal Medications
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overgrowth, certain chronic infections, allergies, and chronic immune suppression are now being directly linked to the distorted internal landscape antibiotics cause. Marc Lappé comments:
Lincomycin eliminates virtually all of the bacteria that require oxygen, while neomycin and kanamycin decrease the number of oxygen-requiring germs and gram-positive anaerobic ones, leading to overgrowth of
Candida albicans
and
Staphylococcus aureus
. Polymyxin can reduce native
E. coli
to the point of extinction, leaving the terrain open for staph and strep organisms. Erythromycin has a similar favorable effect on streptococci, while bacitracin and damycin, by contrast, appear to favor the growth of
Clostridium difficile
. 38
And it is not just humans that have coevolutionary bacterial partners but all plant, insect, and animal life. When these other life-forms encounter antibiotics, their interior and exterior ecologies are disturbed as well.
If bacteria had not learned how to develop resistance, all life on Earth, including humans, would already have died. When we try to kill all disease organisms on this planet, ultimately, we are acting to kill ourselves.
The situation is dire and there are solutions, but they are not easy ones. As David Livermore has said, âA lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections.â 39 Routine surgeries would no longer be routine but nearly impossible to perform safely. Infectious diseases would regularly become epidemic, sweeping through whole communities. The use of quarantine, rare now, would become common. Mortality among the old and the very young would rise tremendously. An entire world view, commonly accepted by most people in Western countries, would begin to crumble. It would be (medically speaking), for all practical purposes, 1928 again.
In the first edition of this book, I, as many others have done, urged people to give up using antibiotics unless there were a serious threat of death or disability if they did not. (I also thought real estate in Nevada might be a good investment.) More than a decade later, it is clear thatantibiotics are not going to be used any less and in fact are being used at far greater rates than they were 15 years ago. The human species, as a group, has never really been known for doing the sensible thing before it is too late. We will stop using antibiotics only when they truly fail to work. And even then most of the people in the Western world will still try to hold on to them and our fatally flawed approach to bacterial disease.
But for those who clearly understand what the word âexponentialâ means, who want to truly empower themselves and their families and prepare for the time that is so quickly approaching us, there are options.
You can take control over your own health and health care. You can prepare. You can learn to use herbal medicines to heal yourself from disease. And you can learn what to do if you find that one day you need to know how to treat a resistant infection.
The rest of this book is designed to help you do just that.
2
THE RESISTANT ORGANISMS, THE DISEASES THEY CAUSE, AND HOW TO TREAT THEM
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
â Albert Einstein
Included among the Gram-positive pathogens are methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
and
S. epidermidis,
vancomycin-resistant
Enterococcus faecium
and
E. faecialis,
and the rapidly growing mycobacteria. In the past five years, however, no fewer than four novel agents have been approved that have clinical activity versus these bacteria. It is really among the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria that we find growing unmet medical need, and only a single new agent has been approved in well over a decade.
â Steven Projan,
Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobials
Many people believe that there will always be antibiotics and that if the ones we
Lincomycin eliminates virtually all of the bacteria that require oxygen, while neomycin and kanamycin decrease the number of oxygen-requiring germs and gram-positive anaerobic ones, leading to overgrowth of
Candida albicans
and
Staphylococcus aureus
. Polymyxin can reduce native
E. coli
to the point of extinction, leaving the terrain open for staph and strep organisms. Erythromycin has a similar favorable effect on streptococci, while bacitracin and damycin, by contrast, appear to favor the growth of
Clostridium difficile
. 38
And it is not just humans that have coevolutionary bacterial partners but all plant, insect, and animal life. When these other life-forms encounter antibiotics, their interior and exterior ecologies are disturbed as well.
If bacteria had not learned how to develop resistance, all life on Earth, including humans, would already have died. When we try to kill all disease organisms on this planet, ultimately, we are acting to kill ourselves.
The situation is dire and there are solutions, but they are not easy ones. As David Livermore has said, âA lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections.â 39 Routine surgeries would no longer be routine but nearly impossible to perform safely. Infectious diseases would regularly become epidemic, sweeping through whole communities. The use of quarantine, rare now, would become common. Mortality among the old and the very young would rise tremendously. An entire world view, commonly accepted by most people in Western countries, would begin to crumble. It would be (medically speaking), for all practical purposes, 1928 again.
In the first edition of this book, I, as many others have done, urged people to give up using antibiotics unless there were a serious threat of death or disability if they did not. (I also thought real estate in Nevada might be a good investment.) More than a decade later, it is clear thatantibiotics are not going to be used any less and in fact are being used at far greater rates than they were 15 years ago. The human species, as a group, has never really been known for doing the sensible thing before it is too late. We will stop using antibiotics only when they truly fail to work. And even then most of the people in the Western world will still try to hold on to them and our fatally flawed approach to bacterial disease.
But for those who clearly understand what the word âexponentialâ means, who want to truly empower themselves and their families and prepare for the time that is so quickly approaching us, there are options.
You can take control over your own health and health care. You can prepare. You can learn to use herbal medicines to heal yourself from disease. And you can learn what to do if you find that one day you need to know how to treat a resistant infection.
The rest of this book is designed to help you do just that.
2
THE RESISTANT ORGANISMS, THE DISEASES THEY CAUSE, AND HOW TO TREAT THEM
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
â Albert Einstein
Included among the Gram-positive pathogens are methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
and
S. epidermidis,
vancomycin-resistant
Enterococcus faecium
and
E. faecialis,
and the rapidly growing mycobacteria. In the past five years, however, no fewer than four novel agents have been approved that have clinical activity versus these bacteria. It is really among the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria that we find growing unmet medical need, and only a single new agent has been approved in well over a decade.
â Steven Projan,
Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobials
Many people believe that there will always be antibiotics and that if the ones we
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