Questions & Answers

Can Pharmaceutical Drugs Alter My Gut Mircobiome?

I’m a naturopath from New Zealand and we also have the COVID virus in New Zealand, by the way. I think we’ve got five or six people here. I don’t want people panicking about this virus. There’ve been so many viruses around in the last several hundred years and some of these pandemics have been quite severe, but so many people are freaking out needlessly about this one. They really are. Especially people in their 20s and 30s, they’re spinning out. When the death rate is, I think what? .01%, if that at that age group. So yeah, you younger people now, it’s sad that you’ve got this internet stuff that we never grew up with because we have a lot of bad things happen while I was in my 20s, but we weren’t told every five minutes how bad things were. But now, it’s shocking.

Right, let’s look at the gut itself, the microbiome and pharmaceutical medications. If you think that only antibiotics are wrecking your gut, then you’re on a different planet than I am. Any kind of pharmaceutical medication can trash your gut, some far more than others. All right?

Now here’s an interesting study that was published in 2018. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, so it’s not exactly a gaming room in Las Vegas where they did some back room study, is it? I mean, this is a proper, proper study and the Germans really know how to do medical studies, I’ll tell you that much. So Dr. Tepasse from the Molecular Biology Laboratory and his colleagues tested 835 drugs. These are non-antibiotic pharmaceutical drugs, okay? And on 40 common gut bacteria, so these drugs were tested on all these gut bacteria, so the 40 common ones. Roughly 25% of all drugs restrained the growth of one bacteria at the minimum, and 5% of all these drugs affected 10 drugs or more.

The authors found that patients taking non-antibiotic pharmaceutical drugs, often have side effects as similar as reported to those four antibiotics. The menagerie of microbes living in your gut is essential to your health. Identifying drugs that affect specific gut bacteria, could help if it’s to develop new drugs and reduce side effects of existing drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs. Why are they going to keep developing drugs all the time? Why can’t they develop plant-based medicines or things or don’t trash the gut? It’s crazy, isn’t it? Everything’s about drugs, drugs, drugs.

There was so many natural medicines that don’t affect the gut, okay? But scientists still believe that just about anything that comes out of the ground, grows out of the ground, is poisonous until they stick it in a lab and synthesize it. And then they make it wonderful for humans to use. They take water out of the ground, they make Coca Cola and they give it to humans because it’s better than water. I mean, come on. How many more brain cells do you need to realize it’s a stupid pile of, you know what? Of do-do. Okay?

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So any kind of pharmaceutical you take, especially on a daily basis, is going to undermine your gut function, any kind of pharmaceutical. It’s even rare to find someone like me who’s 60, who’s not on any kind of drug at all. All right? So many people take pharmaceutical drugs. I strongly recommend if you’ve been told by your doctor you need XYZ pill for the rest of your life, you need to walk to another doctor, or find someone who can get you off this stuff. I can’t see the need for someone to stay on a drug for 20, 30 years every single day to improve their health, when clearly we can see through studies, it’s undermining their health.

A lot of it depends on your age because I find people my age or older are not really interested in making pharmaceutical changes because, after all, the doctor is God. Actually, the specialist, I think, is a specialist God and the doctors, Jesus? It’s something like that, anyway, I was told once. These people are apparently like the Pope to the older generation.

The younger generation, nah, we don’t need these guys. We go to Dr. Google. That’s a dangerous assumption, too. You definitely need expert medical care, but you don’t need over doctoring. You don’t need the old dinosaur doctor that will still quickly give you an antibiotic. You know, one cough in the room and you’ve got two weeks of penicillin. You don’t need that anymore. That’s from the 1940s and ’50s. That kind of draconian medicine is dead now.

The day will come when no patient is ever given an antibiotic. I can see it coming up because they’re far too devastating. And the day will come far in the future, where no synthesized drugs will be given to humans unless for a very specific reason, because they will have long learned cause and effect in future times. Now we’re still living, in my opinion, in the Dark Ages, the pharmaceutical Dark Ages, not dissimilar to how people lived a long time ago when they actually cut people open and let blood out and put leeches all over people thinking that would improve them.

Well, we’ve actually come a few rungs up the ladder but not that far, when you think about it. We’re still doing dumb things with people. But yeah, gut microbes are vulnerable to a wide range of drugs, so it’s your call. Okay? It’s your life. It’s your body. If you want to keep taking drugs, it’s up to you. But if you get sick or you want to get off them and go and see someone and to see if you really do need to take these medications, because I really don’t believe, after all the years I’ve seen patients, that people do need to take drugs on and on and on and on for all their lives. I just think it’s wrong. It’s the wrong thing to do.