How Can Antibiotic Use Affect Bacteria Balance in the Stomach (Gut Flora)?

Although antibiotics are an important medical advance, overuse can lead to an imbalance of bacteria in the gut, and a weakening of the digestive and immune systems. Watch as integrative gastroenterologist Robynne Chutkan, MD, discusses this issue.

Transcript

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There's no question that antibiotics

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are one of the most important medical discoveries. But now we've entered an era of over diagnosis and over treatment, and estimates suggest that almost a half

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of all antibiotic use is unnecessary. This wouldn't be such a problem if antibiotics were benign, but the truth is a typical broad spectrum

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antibiotic will destroy one third of your gut bacteria. And there's no guarantee that those species are all ever

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going to come back or that they're going to come back in sufficient numbers that are required to keep you healthy. So we're seeing incredible overuse of antibiotics

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and it's destroying gut bacteria and really creating damage to the microbiome so that we have a frailer, less diverse microbiome because

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of all the antibiotic use. And so that has profound implications for our immune system and our digestive health.