Antibiotics Worked Miracles For Decades - Then Things Went Terribly Wrong - Doctor Explains

superbug apocalypse and antibiotic resistance

those are big scary words but how bad is it really well according to the World

Health Organization, W.H.O., antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest

threats that we have to global health every 15 minutes someone dies in the

United States because of a super bug that we basically created that's thirty

five thousand people a year and around the world over 700 thousand people die

every year now from superbugs and that's not even the worst part even though

that's a large number what's even worse is what's about to happen and the World

Health Organization estimates that we will have 10 million deaths a year from

superbugs unless we drastically change the way that we use antibiotics in this

video you will learn what an antibiotic really is how it actually works and when

it does more harm than good that way you can know enough to be part of the

solution rather than the problem when it comes to superbugs coming right up

hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss

anything what if I told you that medical doctors around the world are breeding

superbugs in the general population in people like you and me and the people

are not informed that they're part of that experiment that sound crazy right

that sounds like the biggest conspiracy theory you ever heard and yet

unfortunately that's pretty much exactly what's going on it's not happening

because people are evil it's because they are ignorant they are uninformed

they don't realize what's happening and the seriousness of what they're

participating in and this should be of concern to all of us because this cuts

across men and women all ages all countries and it's a growing problem so

let's just start off with some of the basics what is an antibiotic what what

does antibiotic mean well the word itself means against life all right

it's a substance that kills something and the good thing about antibiotics is

that they kill bacteria without killing the body's cells so it's selective in

that sense okay that's why they were so revolutionary that's why it is a miracle

drug but once we understand that they are

against life that they kill something we also have to realize that they can be

very destructive and especially when they're overused they are very

destructive so the thing that they kill even though they spare human cells they

also kill off the bacteria in your gut your microbiome and since you can only

be as healthy as your microbiome every time that you take an antibiotic you are

upsetting the balance you're killing off certain strains and you're allowing

other strains to proliferate and then if you

eat a lot of sugar and processed foods now you're going to give all of those

non wanted unwanted bacteria in a virtual buffet so you're further

upsetting that balance so because antibiotics kill things even though they

spare human cells they do kill off both wanted and unwanted bacteria in your

body so in your gut you have something called your microbiome the flora of all

the life-forms and bacteria that live in your gut and you can only be as healthy

as your gut bacteria when they are unhealthy you're unhealthy when they're

out of balance you're out of balance so an antibiotic it doesn't discriminate

much it pretty much just kills off a lot or most of the bacteria in your gut and

then depending on what you eat afterwards you might replenish the

bacteria that you want or the ones that you don't want and if you'd love sugar

and processed food and grain then you're going to selectively feed the pathogenic

bacteria you're gonna feed the ones you don't want and they're gonna start

taking over and then if you repeat this antibiotics course which happens to a

lot of people now you're getting your bacterial flora more and more out of

whack the second reason not to use antibiotics

unless you have to is that it decreases your immunity how does it do that

well the way that you build immunity is by being exposed to pathogens and then

your immune system goes to work to identify and develop a defense against

those pathogens so the more varied pathogens you're exposed to and the more

that you successfully develop your own defense against them the stronger your

immune system is the more capable it is but if every time you get an infection

you take an antibiotic then you're not allowing your body the

chance to develop that immunity so you're hampering your immune

system babies are born pretty much without an immune system that's why the

mothers milk contain immunoglobulins to help the baby fight off disease but if

you keep giving the baby antibiotics everything they get a little sniffle it

never gets a chance to develop a proper immunity the next thing we need to

understand is how antibiotics work when do they work and when do they not work

so the mechanism by which an antibiotic works is that it destroys cell walls and

it interferes with metabolism and in a bacterium and bacterium has a cell wall

this would be a bacterium and very often they have a little tail so they can move

around and inside they have a metabolic machinery that's very similar to what

you're inside of cells look like they can make proteins they can create energy

out of sugar and so forth so a bacterium is alive and the antibiotic works

because it's against life it can destroy the cell walls so the bacterium starts

leaking and it can interfere with the life-sustaining processes and the

duplication of that bacterium however a virus is not like a bacterium a virus

doesn't have a cell wall a virus doesn't have metabolism a virus is technically

not alive so you can't kill it all right so an antibiotic being against

life has no impact on a virus the virus is more like a crystal it can't generate

energy on its own it uses the energy of the host cell a virus is pretty much

just a cluster of genetic material and a few more parts and it uses the energy it

uses the resources of the cell it's infecting to duplicate that material but

it never was alive so you can't really kill it that's why

antibiotics have no effect and they are never ever recommended for a virus the

only time they are recommended is for and bacterium so antibiotics don't work

for viruses and they destroy your microbiome your gut flora you don't want

to take them unless it's absolutely necessary but how does that lead to

superbugs well bacteria just like humans are

constantly evolving they're constantly adapting their certain mutations there's

certain traits that get strengthened and bacteria are no exception so if you have

an area a tissue that has been infected by bacteria there's going to be

different kinds of bacteria there's going to be a variation in the strains

of those bacteria so let's say that there be a certain number of blue ones

and a certain number of red ones and they're kind of the same but there's

slight variations and the red ones are a little bit more resistant they're a

little bit stronger and then you give this person an antibiotic and the

antibiotic goes to work to kill off bacteria and which one is it going to

kill first the strong ones were the weak ones right it's going to kill off the

weak ones first and the ones that have the most resistance the ones that have

adapted the ones that have changed a little bit so they're not as affected by

the antibiotic they're gonna survive and now what we have done is we've given

them a competitive advantage whatever fuel and resources are available in this

tissue there is no competition it's a buffet it's a smorgasbord it's free for

all and now we have selectively bred a stronger bacterium that's more resistant

and then eventually if we do this over and over and over and over then these

bugs are going to develop into superbugs because every time that we step in and

kill off the weak ones the stronger

a competitive advantage so when should you use an antibiotic well if it is

indeed a bacterial infection you may or may not need an antibiotic if your body

can fight it off on its own you're better off without the antibiotic

because you're not destroying your biome and you're strengthening your immunity

but there are times when the body is so stressed when the body is so challenged

when your immune system is so beaten down and when the bug is so strong that

you'd want to use an antibiotic so for serious bacterial infections they can be

life-saving and one of the primary examples there

may be others but this is the one they always point out in school is bacterial

and seffle itís basically brain inflammation and this one could be viral

or it could be bacterial now if it is bacterial in an antibiotic will help and

if it is bacterial and you don't treat it if you don't get the antibiotic it's

over 70% fatal these people die in a couple of days and the antibiotic will

save their life if it's untreated 70% died and the ones who survive pretty

much across the board will have severe neurological damage so it's almost a

hundred percent of people that get their life destroyed and an antibiotic can

help so this is where we want to use it and that's why it's so critical that we

don't use it when we don't have to so that we don't develop the superbugs and

that we have the the miracle drug when appropriate so the only other time that

it's appropriate besides when it's life-threatening is

when it looks like it could be life-threatening if something is looking

so bad and it's getting worse quickly then you may not want to take the time

and wait to see to verify that it is bacterial and that would be a time when

it'd be still appropriate even though you don't know for sure and so if it

looks like or it could be fatal or threatening then obviously that could be

appropriate and that would be a decision that the doctor would make at the time

so this is a huge problem it has been growing for decades and all the

government agencies and the World Health Organization they know that this is a

big deal so they've issued some guidelines and here are the guidelines

from the CDC and they say a common cold is the third most frequent diagnosis in

adults it's by far the most common respiratory infection and it's the cause

for the common cold that most adults experience about two to four times per

year and in no circumstance is an antibiotic recommended for a viral

infection so next condition is called acute rhinosinusitis Rhyno means no

sinuses or sinuses so it's like a head cold basically and this is when you have

pressure and stuffiness and stuff oozing and it happens to about 12% of people

every year so it's like the common cold is 40 times more common than the

diagnosis of acute rhinosinusitis and then they go on to saying that up to 98%

of this condition is viral again antibiotics don't work for viruses and

then they say that it may not even help for a bacterial infection even if it's

bacterial antibiotics may still not help right so the management the

recommendations are that if they have established a bacterial infection then

they say watch and wait unless it is a complicated case so in the small

percentage that is actually bacterial they still recommend that you wait so

that's for the head cold now if it moves down into the chest then the most common

thing is called acute uncomplicated bronchitis and again they establish that

95% of the is viral according to the American

Association of family physicians the recommended treatment routine treatment

of uncomplicated acute bronchitis with antibiotics is not recommended

regardless of how long you have had it next is pharyngitis this is when you

lose your voice because of an infection and this is caused by something called

GA s group a beta hemolytic streptococcal bacteria and this is the

only time where it's usually appropriate with an antibiotic but they go on to

saying only five to ten percent of these cases of adult sore throat are caused by

this ga s so they say it is not recommended to give antibiotics unless

you run a test first to establish that it's probably bacterial at least so the

guidelines are pretty clear that the only time it's appropriate is with a

serious bacterial infection now how well is that working they set out to do a

study where they looked at the prescriptions and the diagnosis and what

the procedure was dr. Jeffery Lanier of Northwestern University Feinberg School

of Medicine in Chicago led a team that looked at a total of 510 thousand

prescriptions from 514 clinics over a period of two years and it turned out

that 54% of the time they had a diagnosis of an infection he didn't

specify if it was bacterial or viral but half the time they had an infection and

the other half they didn't so 46 percent of the time there was no diagnosis no

indication of anything infectious going on and yet they were given an antibiotic

prescription in 29 percent of the cases they had a diagnosis of something else

like headache or high blood pressure in 17% of the cases there was no

diagnosis at all so when we look back about what we just talked about from the

CDC that about 85 to 90 percent of infections are viral and then we realize

that half the time they don't even make a diagnosis then we can safely assume

that the red that little sliver here is when it may be appropriate to prescribe

an antibiotic and the rest of the time it was inappropriate and this is out of

270 million prescriptions in the United States so it's almost one per person per

year now with well-educated and caring

doctors how did we get to this point well first of all before nineteen 1900s

there were no miracle drugs and when they discovered penicillin and

antibiotics it was a miracle it saved a bunch of people that had previously died

so of course everyone was excited and they started using it for everything but

then we also have to understand that medical doctors are just people they

have a few more years of education but they still have bills to pay and they

still want to be nice to people so when someone comes in and says I'm

coughing I'd like a prescription give me something for this and then we train the

patient that they're supposed to get something now next time if the patient

comes and they don't get something they think the doctors not doing his job and

then they're gonna go down the street to someone who will do the job properly and

prescribe that prescription so we've been trained to expect a prescription

when we go to the doctor so it becomes more and more difficult for doctors to

deny that they have to spend a lot of times to explain they have to know how

big the problem is and they have to be willing to take the time to explain to

the patient why it's not a good idea to get an antibiotic another big problem is

that the majority of Antep actually go in animal feed and it

doesn't matter if the bacteria mutates and get the competitive advantage in a

human or in an animal they still kind of get out into the environment and when we

look at animal feed more and more products that I see they say they state

on the package that absolutely no antibiotics or hormones were used in the

feeding of these animals in the production of this food and more and

more people are sort of getting their eyes open and realizing that hey I don't

want that stuff and yet the sales of antibiotics go up the sales of

antibiotics for animal feed between 2009 and 2014

it went up 25% and at the same time more and more products are saying that they

don't use it I don't want to point fingers here but I think there's

something a little fishy going on so now what what do we do about this how can we

be part of the solution and stop being part of the problem well first of all

just say no understand when it might be appropriate and if it's not appropriate

just don't take it use it only if necessary and that's a big if

because to me now this isn't going to hold true for everyone but based on my

experience in my life I have only once in my life taken an antibiotic and it

was a really bad idea because I had no idea why I was taking it at the time

this was back in college when I was training for the Olympics and I had some

foot pain and they said well we don't know what it is let's try an antibiotic

and because I had never been exposed to antibiotics growing up in Sweden I had

never ever hardly heard of him I didn't know what it was I didn't know if it was

something I was supposed to say no to or if it could be a bad thing so I took it

and of course it didn't help the foot but I didn't know when

better and then that was 35 years ago and I'm doing pretty well without

antibiotics I'm not saying there will never be a time I'm not saying I'm not

open to taking it if it's necessary but I'm not going to take one just for

convenience if it's the difference between being sick for not taking it and

being sick for another week I'll be sick for another week

because then I'll still have my gut flora intact and I will have

strengthened my immunity a little bit okay

so if it is life-threatening if it's serious if it could do some serious

damage then of course you want to take it the next thing is that if for some

reason for whatever reason you start it let's say that you watch this video and

you just started on antibiotics and then you hear this and you say oh I don't

want to take those I'll stop don't do that okay if you have started the course

finish the course because if you take if you go halfway through now you're gonna

kill off some of these bugs and you're gonna give a competitive advantage not

just to the strongest but to some of the ones that you haven't killed off

completely so now you run the risk of getting sick again and making more

superbugs so if you started it then you want to finish the course so I encourage

you to learn enough learn enough about antibiotics learn enough about health so

that you can be a resource for yourself and for others tell others how this

works and that way you can be an active part in the solution and we can stop

this from happening if you enjoyed this video I am sure you're going to love

that one thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video