How dangerous is the indiscriminate use of antibiotics?
The indiscriminate use of antibiotics is a serious issue in that it can lead to antibiotic resistance, making infections difficult to treat. Watch family physician and author Joel Fuhrman, MD, discuss this concern, and how eating superfoods can help.
Transcript
You have to ask your doctor, is it absolutely necessary that I take this antibiotic? Is there any way I could get well without an antibiotic?
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Now, this is a serious problem because antibiotics are very toxic drugs. We now know that bacterial infections can kill us.
We know that we have skin infections that can eat away at your body. We have pneumonias, and we have-- it can cause meningitis. It can cause, in other words, sepsis through the bloodstream.
These are serious, life-threatening infections that in the future can get seriously worse and worse that doctors won't be able to help us with.
So we have to stop that right now. And the best way we can do to stop it is by us having supported by us eating healthy, eating--
making sure we have no nutritional deficiencies, eating superfoods that arm our body with the ability to fight off infection, because the more infections you
have and the more your immune system is suppressed, the more potential you have to catch an infection and even a serious infection.
The other thing that's important to remember is that antibiotics don't-- antibiotics use doesn't just cause future infections
that are more resistant. They're also linked to higher rates of asthma in the future, higher rates of allergies, and they can cause cancer.
But higher use of antibiotics increases the risk of breast cancer. Higher use of antibiotics increases lymphoma. And we give antibiotics to animals
to help them gain weight. But when humans take us, they make us become overweight too. So antibiotics are serious drugs that have
long-term dangerous effects. Every time you go to a doctor with the idea that you think you need an antibiotic, you have to ask your doctor, is it absolutely necessary
that I take this antibiotic? Is there any way I could get well without an antibiotic? We have to all be thinking-- and doctors are thinking this,
and you should be too-- is how we can decrease the risk of antibiotics and decrease their use as much as possible.
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