5 ms·

Now I'm no medical expert but antibiotics resolve an infection after a certain amount of time. Even for Lyme and leprosy. There may be health after-effects but

Now I'm no medical expert but antibiotics resolve an infection after a certain amount of time. Even for Lyme and leprosy. There may be health after-effects but those would not be resolved by antibiotics since the infection is gone. What could possibly outlast 20 years of continuous antibiotics that isn't either completely killed or mutates and renders the antibiotics ineffective? And then be resolved with a fast?

lkrubner 7y ago
Teenagers with acne often take antibiotics for many years. I had one friend with severe acne who took antibiotics well into adulthood. Those teenagers, who take antibiotics, with a microscope at home can do this simple experiment: prick your finger with a needle and put a drop of blood on steriled glass, then put that under a microscope. Do you see bacteria? Yes, of course you do. Even if you take antibiotics for 20 years, your body will still be seething with bacteria. There is no way to get rid of the bacteria on your body. That isn’t what antibiotics do. Antibiotics work with your immune system to bring bacterial load back to a reasonable level. If antibiotics killed all bacteria then people with compromised immune systems could be kept safe from bacteria with antibiotics. But there isn’t a doctor in the world who thinks that’s possible.
- mrfusion 7y ago
  I’m under the impression that blood is very sterile. That’s the point of your immune system.
  - lkrubner 7y ago
    "that blood is very sterile" Please, if you can find a microscope, go look. Use your eyes. Your blood system is absolutely not sterile, that is a wildly non-scientific thing to say. Your immune system can not possibly go after ever protein it meets, otherwise you would be allergic to all food, and you would die. When you see an article such as "The dormant blood microbiome in chronic, inflammatory diseases" ask yourself, what is a dormant blood microbiome? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487407/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487407/
- Something1234 7y ago
  Don't you need some kind of dye to see the bacteria?
  - lkrubner 7y ago
    There are certain kinds of bacteria that you need to stain, because otherwise they are nearly perfectly transparent, but there are lots of larger bacteria that you can see well with even a fairly cheap microscope, of the type that teenagers use in school. Indeed, when I was 15 years old, I remember watching a lot of single celled organisms crawl around in the microscope that I was assigned at school. Although most bacteria tend to be on the smaller side of single celled organisms, some larger bacteria are still easy to see, even with such cheap microscopes.
pleasehello 7y ago
With Leprosy, a major difficulty is the large % of junk DNA and rapid mutation. Immune system relies on creating specialized T-cells to identify protein markers of harmful agents, but M Leprae can change those protein markers in each generation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29367657 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29367657

lkrubner 7y ago

Teenagers with acne often take antibiotics for many years. I had one friend with severe acne who took antibiotics well into adulthood. Those teenagers, who take antibiotics, with a microscope at home can do this simple experiment: prick your finger with a needle and put a drop of blood on steriled glass, then put that under a microscope. Do you see bacteria? Yes, of course you do. Even if you take antibiotics for 20 years, your body will still be seething with bacteria. There is no way to get rid of the bacteria on your body. That isn’t what antibiotics do. Antibiotics work with your immune system to bring bacterial load back to a reasonable level. If antibiotics killed all bacteria then people with compromised immune systems could be kept safe from bacteria with antibiotics. But there isn’t a doctor in the world who thinks that’s possible.

mrfusion 7y ago
I’m under the impression that blood is very sterile. That’s the point of your immune system.
- lkrubner 7y ago
  "that blood is very sterile" Please, if you can find a microscope, go look. Use your eyes. Your blood system is absolutely not sterile, that is a wildly non-scientific thing to say. Your immune system can not possibly go after ever protein it meets, otherwise you would be allergic to all food, and you would die. When you see an article such as "The dormant blood microbiome in chronic, inflammatory diseases" ask yourself, what is a dormant blood microbiome? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487407/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487407/
Something1234 7y ago
Don't you need some kind of dye to see the bacteria?
- lkrubner 7y ago
  There are certain kinds of bacteria that you need to stain, because otherwise they are nearly perfectly transparent, but there are lots of larger bacteria that you can see well with even a fairly cheap microscope, of the type that teenagers use in school. Indeed, when I was 15 years old, I remember watching a lot of single celled organisms crawl around in the microscope that I was assigned at school. Although most bacteria tend to be on the smaller side of single celled organisms, some larger bacteria are still easy to see, even with such cheap microscopes.

pleasehello 7y ago

With Leprosy, a major difficulty is the large % of junk DNA and rapid mutation. Immune system relies on creating specialized T-cells to identify protein markers of harmful agents, but M Leprae can change those protein markers in each generation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29367657 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29367657