Only some antibiotics will cause issues. If you have to take alternatives to any of the "cillin" family, the medical community at large recommends no more than 2 full treatments within 18 months. Anything more than that can lead to things like C. Diff and may require a fecal transplant or needing to take probiotics that a pharmacy will carry in a refrigerator up on their deck.
I forget what the terminology is, but broad spectrum antibiotics are generally worse for your gut than something targeted, iirc.
This is really surprising to me since there is a lot of evidence that oral antibiotics can mess up your gut flora, creating all sorts of bad side effects. Do you have any digestive issues?
I've been told (by someone who has had C. diff and dealt with a number of gastro issues) that it can take up to 7 years for your gut to stabilize after simply taking antibiotics.
With that being said, some googling just now to make sure I'm not just spouting nonsense hasn't turned up a 7 year figure. But it has returned a bunch of articles pointing to studies that suggest it takes a long time. [1] says after 10 months there's still a disturbance.
Antibiotics are not 100% safe, they can have serious life threatening consequences. They can knock your bacterial balance out of whack in your digestion system leading to colon issues.
Even relatively short term use of antibiotics can result in digestive issues lasting multiple years. Auto-brewery syndrome for example is linked to antibiotics and can seemingly persist until treatment by antifungals.
I had to use oral antibiotics about a year ago for reasons that could have been avoided. I was pretty upset about it precisely because it probably wreaked havoc on all the beneficial gut microbes that I had built up over the years.
Cipro did wonders on my intestinal tract, effectively killing everything including the good. Had nine days of that to fight an under the skin infection/etc. Months after I started having problems with food, restrooms were becoming my second home and my commute was planned around easy access to them. You never want to experience life where one bit of food can send you off.
Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. New antibiotics and replenishment medicines, diet with lots of probiotics, and within a few months I was back to mostly normal.
My story is simple, if you end up on harsh antibiotics it can change your life. Plan for it.
Keep in mind that you'd need a long term change in your gut flora - a short term disruption by a single course of antibiotics is usually returned to equilibrium in a short amount of time, and would be easily masked by the psychological effects of actually being sick.
Longer term microbiome disruptions are also major life events. It's a hard thing to disentangle.
This is a shot in the dark, but I had taken antibiotics to treat an infection twice last fall, then suddenly this summer have been having unexplainable (so far) stomach issues. Given the somewhat longer period after taking the antibiotics, is the length of time somewhat similar to yours?
> * avoid taking antibiotics unless you're really sick enough to need
+1 on this. I had to take antibiotics for a strep throat infection. Before this, I could eat anything and never have a loose bowel movement. I had various gut issues for almost an year after I took the antibiotics. I used to feel like I had a very healthy gut before.
Antibiotics is basically chemotherapy but for bacteria, killing a lot of the good bacteria in your guts causes all kinds of havoc.
I've only had to use it twice in my life, one time as an adult. I then forgot to also take probiotics at the same time, had stomac issues for weeks after the treatment.
This is antibiotic marketing bs. There are antibiotic that harm pathogenic or prone-to-overgrowth bacteria harder than others, but they ALL lead to a state of dysbiosis and susceptibility to subsequent colonization/overgrowth/dysregulation
And this is the exact reason whymost of the time, GI problems come back or are replaced with different symptoms after antibiotics, and why we need more Fecal Microbiota Transplant research.
The issue with the antibiotics is that they will screw up your microbiome which will have negative effects on its own until it naturally builds back up
Fluoroquinolone antibiotics (cipro, levaquin, etc) are dangerous and horrific, and irreversibly destroy gut bacteria. This article is about fluoroquinolones, which are well documented to cause C.Diff infections because they destroy most gut bacteria except C.Diff, allowing it to overrun.
I forget what the terminology is, but broad spectrum antibiotics are generally worse for your gut than something targeted, iirc.
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