Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (2 page)

In other words, if someone came to me for help and they were in serious danger of dying, the herbs in this book are the ones I would use. If I myself were at risk of death from an antibiotic-resistant disease, these are the herbs that I personally would use (and have used). Without hesitation.

Olive leaf has not, at least in my experience, shown that broad and reliable of an effect, even though in some circumstances and for some people it is highly effective.

Garlic didn't make the cut either, in spite of having been included in the older edition of this book. After observing garlic in clinical practice for over 20 years, I no longer feel it is very effective in the treatment of internal bacterial infections. The plant and its constituents are active and very widely so—in vitro, but that activity doesn't translate well to the real world. Clinical trials and in vivo research just haven't found that those in vitro studies translate to efficacy in the treatment of diseases in humans, especially of resistant bacterial organisms. For topical use, because of its broad antibacterial actions, I think garlic useful—though there are many other plants that are as good or better. And in certain, very limited situations, it can help with some systemic infections—if you use it properly. Generally, though, its effectiveness lies elsewhere. Garlic is very useful for lowering blood pressure and for helping with high cholesterol, it is excellent as a regular food additive for raising immune function (in a general, tonic sort of way), and it does help a bit in the prevention of colds and flu.

The dreaded “garlic breath” effect doesn't actually come just from eating garlic but instead from the plant's compounds being expressed through the lung tissue as they are moved out of the body. This is why the plant works to some extent for viral respiratory infections. Nevertheless, in spite of its reputation and long use as an antibacterial, I just haven't seen the kind of potency I want to see to label garlic a primary plant to use in the treatment of resistant organisms. If my life depended on it, which it may, garlic would not, even remotely, be my first choice for treatment. I can hardly then recommend it for you.

If you are familiar with the first edition of this book, you will probably notice that I have removed grapefruit seed extract (GSE) from this new edition. The grapefruit plant,
Citrus paradisi
, contains, as all citrus plants do, a great many antibacterial compounds that are effective against a wide variety of organisms (see, for instance, Z. Cvetnic and S. Vladimir-Knezevic, “Antimicrobial activity of grapefruit seed and pulp ethanolic extract,”
Acta Pharm
54 (3): 243–50). Its antibacterial potency is not in doubt, nor is its use for millennia in traditional medicine as an antibacterial, among other things. However, intensive research has found that nearly all commercial GSE products contain synthetic disinfectants such as benzethonium or benzalkonium salts. (The best article on this is N. Sugimoto et al., “Survey of synthetic disinfectants in grapefruit seed extract and its compounded products,”
Shokuhin Eiseigaku Zasshi
49 (1): 56–62.)

For those who have insisted that grapefruit is not antibacterial and that it is only the synthetic disinfectants that make GSE effective, you are, and always have been, incorrect. For those who have insisted that GSE is natural (myself among them), you (we) are, and apparently always have been, wrong. The commercial grapefruit seed extracts just aren't a natural herbal medicine; thus GSE is out. And while all parts of the grapefruit plant are antibacterial, there are nevertheless a great
many antibacterial herbs that are more effective than
Citrus paradisi
; hence the plant's absence from this book.

As with my earlier effort, this new edition of
Herbal Antibiotics
is focused on the treatment of antibiotic-resistant diseases. Resistant bacteria caught my attention in 1991, and they've never let it go. The data were clear then: we had a very limited time in which to alter our behavior if we wished antibiotics to remain part of our pharmaceutical options, and many people, including scores of bacterial researchers and epidemiologists, knew it. But knowing something and intelligently acting on it are two different things; there is perhaps nothing more difficult for human beings than actually acting on what we know to be the sensible thing to do. As a species, when it comes to the overuse of antibiotics, we haven't altered our behavior to match what the researchers have been saying, and finding, for decades, that we must do—that is, stop using antibiotics except in absolutely essential circumstances, which is to say, in situations where there is a strong possibility of death or permanent disability if they aren't used.

In consequence the difficulties that face us are now dire; we cannot escape the emergence of pharmaceutically untreatable, and very serious, diseases in our countries or in our communities. These diseases will not be limited to isolated individuals here and there but will instead be widespread epidemics of tremendous virulence. And those epidemics will not come only from the organisms we currently know about; more types of resistant bacteria (and viruses) are emerging yearly.

The growth curve is inexorable, and the emergence of a resistant epidemic only a matter of time, and a very short time at that. When it comes, most, if not all, pharmaceutical antibiotics will be useless.

There are alternatives, however, to the pharmaceuticals that once seemed our saviors and are now our bane, for bacteria do not develop resistance to plant medicines. They can't. For plants have been dealing with bacteria a great deal longer than the human species has even existed, some 700 million years.

Plants have long been, and still are, humanity's primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur—instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years—the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing—it doesn't take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe—in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the
Journal of the American Medical Association
); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don't cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do—one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.

Plants are the people's medicine. They always have been. They have been with us since we emerged out of the ecological matrix of this planet—and they still are. And as they always have done, they bring their healing to those in need, at least to those who know about them. And make no mistake: we are going to need them.

It is naive to think we can win.

David Livermore, MD

In the late 1940s, the successes of Waksman and Schatz (streptomycin) and Duggar (tetracycline) led many to believe that bacterial infections were basically conquered. That conceit led to widespread misuse and outright abuse of antibacterial agents. Nonetheless, we still neither fully understand nor appreciate resistance to antibacterial agents…. Many important advances in the practice of medicine are actually at serious risk. Multi-drug resistant bacteria are compromising our ability to perform what are now considered routine surgical procedures…. A ubiquitous phrase encountered in obituaries is “died from complications following surgery,” but what is not well understood is that these “complications” are quite frequently multi-drug resistant infections.

—Steven Projan,
Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobials

We have let our profligate use of antibiotics reshape the evolution of the microbial world and wrest any hope of safe management from us…. Resistance to antibiotics has spread to so many different, and such unanticipated types of bacteria, that the only fair appraisal is that we have succeeded in upsetting the balance of nature.

—Marc Lappé,
When Antibiotics Fail

It's hard to escape the realization that when it comes to bacterial disease we are in trouble. Twenty years ago, when my interest was first stimulated by it, there might have been a newspaper article on antibiotic resistance or a resistant disease outbreak perhaps once a month. I come across them almost daily now. The headlines often look like this:

Hospital Continues to Limit Visitors as It Fights Superbugs
Ottawa Citizen,
December 21, 2010

Staph Bacteria: Blood-Sucking Superbug Prefers Taste of Humans
Science Daily,
December 16, 2010

Hospitals preparing for killer bug
AsiaOne,
December 2, 2010

Eight Deadly Superbugs Lurking in Hospitals
Nikhil Hutheesing,
Health Care,
October 17, 2010

New “superbugs” raising concerns worldwide
Rob Stein,
Washington Post,
October 11, 2010

New Drug-Resistant Superbugs Found in 3 States
Associated Press, September 14, 2010

The Spread of Superbugs
Nicholas Kristof,
New York Times,
March 7, 2010

Report: Superbugs killed record number
UPI, May 23, 2008

Sometimes they take a more personal turn:

The fight for life against superbugs
Boonsri Dickenson,
Smartplanet,
March 24, 2010

‘The NHS failed my mum,' says distraught daughter
Grantham Journal,
December 14, 2010

The ‘catalogue of errors' that cost this father his life
Denis Campbell and Anushka Asthana,
The Guardian,
November 27, 2010

The first sort of article (i.e., “Superbugs on the increase in care homes,” Daniel Martin,
The Mail Online
, July 16, 2007) tends to focus on numbers and statistics and rarely reflects the human face of the problem. Such articles often end with a statement from a government or medical authority mentioning how new procedures are being
instituted or that new antibiotics are just down the road a ways (they aren't). Nothing to be concerned about even though it sounds a bit scary, say the experts; we have it all in hand (they don't).

The second sort of piece, growing more common every year, presents the human face of the problem. These articles are rarely so blasé. This report, from an article by Sarah White, “The empowered patient,” is representative. It recounts the story of Jeanine Thomas (who later began a “survivors of MRSA support group”) and the moment when all those headlines changed from the theoretical to the very personal:

Thomas' expertise in the MRSA patient perspective comes from her life-threatening battle with bacteria. In 2001, she was in critical condition after contracting MRSA [methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
] following ankle surgery.

“You're just living a normal life—never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said.

The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.
¹

Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don't, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren't even that “lucky.”

Denis Campbell's and Anushka Asthana's article appeared in November 2010 in the English paper
The Guardian
. It describes the last few months of Frank Collinson's life.

Ex-docker Frank Collinson, 72, was admitted to hospital following a fall in May 2009. When he went home days later he had cracked ribs and a skin infection…. Four months later he was dead….

Soon after arriving in Hull's main hospital, Collinson contracted the deadly superbug MRSA. Astonishingly, no health professional told his son, Gary. It was only by Googling the name of the drug being administered through a drip that Gary discovered that it was a strong antibiotic and that his father had the potentially fatal infection. “I went ballistic,” he said.
²

This is often how the personal face of the resistance epidemic emerges into someone's awareness. They, or a relative, go into the hospital for a minor procedure or for help after an accident but what they find in the hospital is far worse than the trouble that sent them there in the first place.

Devastated siblings still reeling from the death of their mother several months ago continue to push for answers on how she contracted a deadly superbug.

Fiona Weatherstone and her four brothers were shocked when their 73-year-old mother, Sylvia Weatherstone, died at Lincoln County Hospital after being admitted for a simple pain-killing injection….

It was in January that Mrs. Weatherstone, formerly of Bristol Close, was admitted for a nerve root injection to numb pain in her back, caused by severe pressure on a nerve root.