Antibiotics for Strep

mamamojo · Jan 8, 2010

Antibiotics for Strep?

Brief article (one page) with good info and homeopathic options for relief!

However, the incidence of rheumatic fever has decreased dramatically since the time when thousands of people died every year from that extremely infectious and painful disease. In the late 1940s, 200,000 people per year developed rheumatic fever. The numbers began declining prior to the availability of antibiotics and ARF has nearly disappeared since the 1970s.
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None of this would be an issue if antibiotics had no side effects. The problem is that they do. Antibiotics disrupt the immune system, and kill beneficial bacteria along with the pathogens. Antibiotics also tend to create resistant strains of bacteria so that they do not work effectively when they are really needed. A further complicating issue is that strep bacteria typically do not disappear from the throat following a course of antibiotics. The bacteria will persist even after signs of the infection have disappeared. If a throat culture is taken at some later date, the bacteria will still be present and another antibiotic prescription will follow even though there is no active infection. Finally, studies have shown that when antibiotics are given for strep throat, the infection tends to recur more often than when they are not prescribed.

I do not recommend antibiotics for strep throat unless an unusual number of ARF cases caused by strep bacteria have been documented in the community, or if your child has pre-existing heart disease. I agree with pediatrician Robert Mendelsohn, whose advice two decades ago remains true today:

"Both throat cultures and antibiotics are to be avoided, because the hazards of treatment outweigh the remote possibility that your child will suffer any lasting effects even if he has a strep infection" (Mendelsohn, 1984).
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Antibiotics for Strep

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