to be really annoyed about antibiotics?

[WaterfallsOver]

Or rather their misuse. I have parent friends who run to the GP every time little Billy has a cough, demanding antibiotics, so many people see them as a panacea. I'm not medically trained but I know they don't work on viruses and many illnesses need to run their course with no medical intervention.

The news is telling us antibiotics won't work in a few years due to over/misuse. I feel really angry that selfishness and stupidity mean in a few years people may die from infections resistant to antibiotics :( if they were only used for serious illness perhaps we'd have a chance. There was a guy who died from resistant infection on the news :(

Here's a recentish (2007) paper In vitro still (although it looks as if there have been some in vivo studies). Looks promising and sounds as if there is a bit active research in this area.

No I don't think she exactly says that either seeker - although of course you could twist it to say that she does.

The GAPS diet is very similar to the diet recommended to me by the (NHS) paediatrician and neurologist btw.

"Were you not breastfeed as a baby, were prone to colds and infections and went on to develop OCD?"

Typed from memory because I couldn't c&p. might not be absolutely word perfect, but nearly.

Nobody is denying that there are remedies to be found in natural products, most of the current abs are based on natural secondary metabolites but the assumption that just because something is natural it is also harmless is not what we see. In my lab we are looking for natural products and it is because of these unknown, not safety-assessed yet natural products we are dealing with that we have a ban on pregnant women in the lab (we find them desk work to do in that time). Manuka honey is a case in point. The main active ingredient is methylglyoxal which is highly cytotoxic. It also doesn?t get absorbed into the body very well so I don?t think that people are going to poison themselves but it is still a toxin.
That?s probably not an issue for things like garlic, onions, sage, ?which had culinary uses for long times and are GRAS but everything else I?d prefer to have some idea about the active ingredient.

oh look these people are suggesting further research into things like garlic might ultimately form the basis for the development of 'green' antibiotics, fungicides and possibly anticancer agents with dramatically reduced side effects in humans

Yes seeker her point is that if you have OCD - those symptoms might be related to your gut. Not that if you haven't been breast fed you will get OCD.

In a similar way the paediatrician and neurologist suggested trying the diet with ds1 - because his condition - severe autism - can be affected by diet. Not because he wasn't breast fed so became autistic (he as breast fed actually, his gut was damaged by repeated antibiotics :rolls yes: )

Well actually gracelo a few people are saying that garlic couldn't possibly have affected ppeat's tooth - whereas a quick search on pubmed suggests that if the garlic extract was able to get anywhere near the infection it may well have. (Which is why I asked her how she got close to the infection)

The key words are "might ultimately". Following lots of research.

Jimjams, I think what she is saying is that you can?t know this from one data point. You just don?t know what would have happened without the garlic, it might have cleared up without it too.

You just don?t know what would have happened without the garlic, it might have cleared up without it too.

Precisely!

I am aware of what is said about vegetables containing allicin. Like most vegetables, they are very good for you for lots of different reasons.

Sadly they were no use in fighting pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, polio or other infectious diseases which used to kill one in 20 children under 1 in the 1930s.

The infant mortality rate was ten times higher then than it is now.

I am confident that the use of garlic has no effect on evil spirits either. I can report that despite never wearing any round my neck I remain untroubled by evil spirits at the age of 52. However, of course that's just anecdotal

Mind you, there's always loads of garlic in my kitchen and I haven't seen a vampire for ages......

Thanks to garlic, only half of the world's population died in the black death. Imagine how terrible it would have been without garlic!

I have been known to crunch on garlic out of desperation when suffering from swollen tonsils and sore throat. I've also made "tea" out of thyme and drank turmeric mixed in milk and sugar. I don't know if it actually works, I normally feel better within a day but it could just be a placebo effect. At least it works some how!

I think studies have shown in the past that people in south east Asia have far less cases of colon cancer than in the western world, which may be due to the turmeric in their diet. Last time I checked (about 7 years ago) testing was being carried out on a drug for cancer using curcumin. Don't know how that worke out.

I hesitate to point out the obvious, but lots of medicines come from "natural' things. They are tested. If they work, they become "medicine" and available on the National Health Service. If they don't work, they are packaged up in pretty pots and sold to people in Islington to cure tiredness, back pain, bloating, and vague feelings of unease. Oh, and illnesses that usually last about 5 days.

Yes seeker Iam fully aware of that fact. What I find about the testing and the "isolating the active ingredient" in something is that sometimes the work is a waste of time because it is the WHOLE herb that actually works properly (e.g. someone removed the 'smell' from garlic to market it as a capsule and then discovered that its power to heal was also removed).

I dislike the sneering at 4 thousand years of humanity having used a herb successfully to cure themselves, as if only the scientists have the answers which they patently do not!

"I dislike the sneering at 4 thousand years of humanity having used a herb successfully to cure themselves, as if only the scientists have the answers which they patently do not!"

The thing about scientists is that they know they don't have all the answers.

And if you can find me actual evidence that garlic cured anything (was it you said it cured bubonic plague?) then I'll be cheering along.

Ppeatfruit.
Erm...I could be wrong about this, but surely during those 4 thousand years people just...er....died? The stats for maternal and infant death ate horrifying.
A very cursory glance at historical mortality figures would show you just how ineffective herbal medicine was/is.

Well saintlyjimjams has a link about garlic about 6 posts upthread that is very interesting.

Sorry if this has already been covered but in reply to seeker there is good evidence that garlic has strong antibacterial (and other?) properties due to its active ingredient allicin. One of the practical design your own experiment assessments I did during my microbiology degree was to investigate and quantify the antibacterial properties of garlic.

However doesn't necessarily equate to a positive effect in situ in a human infection - but there are probably published studies on it.

IMO you can find toxins in anything and probably everything like Manuka honey; I haven't noticed that testing removes toxins from the OTC and prescribed medicines they all seem to have fairly grim side effects so why should the untested ones be any worse?

I don't think anyone is suggesting one data point = definitely works. Although it seems from a brief browse of the literature that no-one foubts garlic has an an antibiotic effect.

Useful to know. Much as I think antibiotics were the most important medical discovery ever I prefer to avoid using them - not least because they caused ds1 a great deal of damage ( especially now we have to give them in high doses). If I have blood poisoning I'll stick to antibiotics (while there are some left that work) but if I have an infection that is in reach, having read the papers I'll certainly try garlic. One of the papers seemed to suggest there is an effect even in the lower gut which is perhaps surprising. I can't see that garlic juice would kill me and if it works I'd rather have garlic than an antibiotic - and might speed up my usual approach of sitting out an infection. If I later have to take antibiotics a lit if the papers are talking about a synergistic effect with antibiotics so it's not going to affect how it works.

Talking about the Black Death is completely missing the point.

No, of course testing doesn?t remove toxins but it helps me decide if I want to use something or not. I would use Manuka honey if I had a skin infection that I believed to be susceptible to it, because I consider the risk of using methylglyoxal in a topical application quite low but I still like to know about it.
With any conventional drug I take I know the amount of active ingredient and I can look up all the safety data available (I?m aware of the fact that I have way more information easily accessible to me than most people though) and I can make a decision if the benefits of taking this drug outweigh the risks. With a natural product from a plant or microbial source you can?t do that, even if the active ingredient is quantified reliably (that?s a whole different problem, reliable quantification) you still have no idea most of the times what else is in there.

And if you can find me actual evidence that garlic cured anything (was it you said it cured bubonic plague?) then I'll be cheering along.

Seeker, that was just me being sarcastic!

As Badvoc has also pointed out, high mortality rates, much shorter life expectancy and crippling disability were par for the course before the discovery of penicillin.

Natural remedies have always been used, but the figures show that they were not used in any effective way. It is scientific testing which has allowed us not just to isolate those substances which are effective, but also the dose and period of treatment. It is absolute nonsense to say that natural remedies are spurned by the pharma industry - screening goes on all the time.

Aspirin, morphine and quinine are examples of natural substances used in medication which readily come to mind. When penicillin was discovered it also led to greater exploration and screening of all sorts of microorganisms from which medication for other diseases like diabetes and cancer was discovered.

The difference is that the pharmaceutical industry can't just make and sell drugs which make you feel sure you feel better just for taking them. They have to be shown to work in a reliable way, contraindications need to be researched, and the advantages of prescribing a particular drug need to outweigh any negative effects.

And yes, all that costs money!