5 ms·

Did her endocrinologist prescribe her antibiotic? I'm asking this because I have Hashimoto's myself and none of the endocrinologists I've seen recommended any

• aviv 9y ago
  Depends on the pharma rep in their area.
• eloff 9y ago
  No, she and my dad just did their own research online and gave it a try. Seems to have worked out really well for her. Her goiter shrank and she had to reduce her thyroid meds. Low dose doxycycline seems who tolerated, and has an interesting side effect of reducing inflammation to near zero in the body (CRP levels of actually zero). Given the role of inflammation in heart disease, that might be helpful for longevity too. There's actually a drug, periostat that's prescribed in this way for oral health. It's 20mg doxycycline taken daily long term. There are studies on it available online.
  • throwaway5752 9y ago
    This is why we have drug resistant bacteria, in a nutshell. Glad your mother's health is better, but if even a small number of people started following this regimen, it would be come useless in a relatively small number of years. edit: I would love it if just one person could tell me how I'm wrong instead of downvoting. Long term low dose antibiotic treatment (doxy is a tetracycline) is how this happens. If you look up how I'm wrong before downvoting, I suspect you will end up not doing so, and perhaps learn something new.
    • _tulpa 9y ago
      So... People shouldn't use drugs that work for them because the bacteria will develop drug resistance to the drugs which are already useless because you can't use them otherwise the bacteria will become resistant?
      • smallnamespace 9y ago
        Just because there are some bacteria that are already resistant to doxy doesn't mean that shifting the entire ecology of human bacteria so that resistance against doxy is selected for is a great idea. If you have a garden and use pesticides, there are probably some weeds that will be resistant to it. But the mere existence of resistant weeds is not an argument for continued indiscriminate use of pesticides, as you will end up with even more. Degree matters.
    • smallnamespace 9y ago
      Not sure why you're getting downvoted actually. Yes, this treatment can probably help some people, but it's probably also true that deploying this en masse would not be a great idea from a long-term ecological perspective. Low-dose antibiotics are already widely used today in farm animals because it lets them gain weight more quickly ( = more profit for the farmer). And now the bacteria have spread out of farms and into the ER rooms and are killing people. Another form of socialized externalities.
      • throwaway5752 9y ago
        I found a few NIH papers after posting, and it appears the available data shows it doesn't result in drug resistance at these dosages. There are a few studies that tracked resistance among patient populations for several years and saw fewer changes than periodic high doses. I don't know.
        • eloff 9y ago
          This is my understanding as well.
    • mrfusion 9y ago
      I Was going to downvote but I’ll respond instead. These people have legimate medical needs for this antibiotic so this isn’t a case where we’d want to withhold it. We’re better off spending our resources discovering new antibiotics instead of neggling who’s deserving of what.
      • throwaway5752 9y ago
        Hashimoto's is awful, but it can also be treated with an oral form of the thyroid hormones to restore appropriate levels (levothyroxine as the original poster mentioned earlier). I believe this is completely effective (I don't know if the underlying condition still causes an uncomfortable/visible goiter). It's generally not fatal when treated. I'm sure you know that bacteria don't have to do traditional reproduction to exchange genetic material so they can pass along traits like antibiotic resistance very rapidly. It can also spread between different species of bacteria (see plasmids, bacterial conjugation/transformation). So this is why I'm against using antibiotics for non-life saving applications, generally. You have widely drug resistant staph (eg, MRSA), e. coli, chlamydia, tuberculosis (XDR TB), et al. causing massive problems in healthcare systems across the world and killing quite a few people. I am not sure if you know this, but given the absence of the selection pressure, bacterial populations can lose drug resistance. It has higher ongoing metabolic requirements to have that trait, and is a evolutionary disadvantage. Also, I don't know if you appreciate the difficulty to find new antibiotics (particularly wide-spectrum and low side-effects/toxicity). I would encourage you to research that topic carefully because it's a subject with a lot of poor information written about it. Finally, I will underscore that I took my own advice, and found multiple papers hosted by the NIH about emergence of drug resistance in patients using very low dose doxy (not in Hashimoto's, but rosacea, where its non-antibiotic properties are also useful, though I'm not sure it's the same mechanism). So I was wrong, it seems. I learned something new in the process of researching my response.
        • fest 9y ago
          Hashimoto's relatively easy to live with (at least, compared to other autoimmune conditions). If properly medicated with replacement hormones, no observable change in life expectancy. If goiter forms (which is a complication of undiagnosed/under-treated Hashimoto's), it's solvable by surgery.