Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Will an antibiotic fix SIBO?
I talk about this all the time. It’s just like, I can’t believe that I hadn’t done this before. So, okay, so can an antibiotics fix SIBO? No. Now those of you out there who have taken antibiotics go, yeah, but I feel better. It can do that. Okay. So, here’s the full thing on antibiotics.
So what is SIBO? Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It’s an imbalance where your good and bad bacteria balance of 80% to 20%, 80% good bacteria, 20% bad bacteria goes kablooey. All right? And for a variety of different reasons, like you got food sensitivities, poor digestive function, stress, all these things that can cause the mechanisms that cause SIBO. You develop more bad bacteria than good bacteria.
Okay. And once you have more bad bacteria, that’s bad, you start getting bloating, you start getting distension, and next thing you know get alternating constipation or you get diarrhea, it crawls up your little intestines, your small little intestines, and they affect your gallbladder. And next thing you know, you’re not digesting your fat-soluble vitamins. It comes all the way up to your stomach. You’re getting acid indigestion and are given a omeprazole for it, which is just perpetuating a problem, by the way. So basically, it’s a fulmination of bad bacteria. So, wouldn’t antibiotic be appropriate for that? Well, yeah, yeah, an antibiotic would absolutely be appropriate for that. And it is appropriate. Wait a minute, you just said it wasn’t. That’s not what I said. And antibiotic is absolutely appropriate for that. And it will kill all of the bacteria, not just the good ones. You’re probably already familiar with this. It’s going to kill the bad ones too.
Let’s just say that you’re educated in this area enough, okay? Because people on the internet all day long now looking at this stuff and you’re looking at me, right? And so, let’s just say you’re doing that, and you know enough to reinoculate yourself with probiotics, okay? That’s a good thing to do. A lot of people don’t do enough. A lot of people, just start looking at different strains. It’s just like, you know, get the biggest probiotic on the planet. I use something called ProbioMed 250 that I’m not shilling for it or anything like that. It’s just the one I use. But you want something up like that, 250 billion. I have people come in and go, “Yeah. I did 15 billion it’s like peeing on a forest fire or somebody who’s just gotten their entire floor wiped out.
So, let’s just say, you went to the doctor. I think they like Remicade if I… okay, maybe I’m wrong on that. Rifaximin, they like rifaximin, I’m sorry, that’s Remicade is a steroid. They like rifaximin. It gets rid of it. You feel good for a while, you feel good. You’ve put your probiotics back in there and if you put your probiotics in there, you might feel good for a couple of months, maybe months. If you haven’t used probiotics, you might feel good for two or three weeks or four, five to six weeks. And in the meantime, what happens is the processes that have created the small intestinal bacteria overgrowth are still there.
You haven’t done anything about that. What created the small intestinal bacteria overgrowth? Okay? So that’s a problem. So, the SIBO is a tool, or I’m sorry, the SIBO. The antibiotics are a tool that can be used in the framework of getting rid of SIBO.
Now, I’ll give you an example. Probably a dozen times a year I’ll have a patient that has started care with us and we’ve evaluated him, and part of their evaluation was that they had SIBO. And in my world, when a person has SIBO, that’s like the first thing that’s got to go. And the things that caused it are the first things that have to go. And so, they’ll call me and say, “You know what? I was just started, and I was feeling good, and I got COVID or then I got whatever, I got sick. COVID was a bad example. Then I got some sort of a bacterial infection, or I developed candida or whatever it was, and they’re giving me antibiotics. I got a sinus problem, I got a sinusitis, and they’re giving me antibiotics.”
Yeah. I mean, is this going to ruin everything we’re doing? I’ll go, no, this is actually going to work faster than what we were going to do. But I’m not a medical doctor so I wouldn’t give you antibiotics, but it’s actually going to kill the SIBO faster than using herbs and botanicals and all the diet and all that type and low fiber diet and all that type of stuff. It’s going to, okay? Anybody says it’s not, hasn’t done this for a living. So, basically, you can do that and while say, “No. This is good because now you are going to kill the SIBO.” Now we don’t have to spend a four to 20 weeks or whatever it is, depending on the person to get rid of the SIBO six to 20 weeks or whatever it is. And we just move on. And here’s the catch with fixing all of the things that cause the SIBO in the first place.
And that’s what the antibiotic doesn’t do, and that’s what medical doctors don’t do. And I have medical doctor colleagues don’t think I’m banging the medical doctors, okay? It’s not what they do. All right?
That’s not what the medical doctors do. That’s not what anybody does. That’s in that field. It’s not even what a lot of people do in the alternative field, frankly. So, they get that SIBO out of the way with the antibiotics, and then we start to work on the things that cause the SIBO. We start to work on the broken-down digestive system. We start to work on their food sensitivities. We might start to work on other things like stress responses. I could name 25 different things that cause SIBO. There’s three major ones and I covered in another video. But anyway, so that’s that, I mean, they also have fecal implants. This has nothing to do with antibiotics or anything, but it’s just an example.
You can go and get fecal implants. Now, I haven’t kept up on it, but a couple of years ago it was like 25 grand if your insurance company paid for it, obviously they paid for 80% of that or whatever it was. And then they take feces that they got out of another person who doesn’t have SIBO and supposedly has a great microbiome. I don’t know how they figure that out, but they take it and they put it in the person who has SIBO, and that helps them. That helps them to get… because they just overwhelm the system with good bacteria. It brings the balance back to normal. And a person feels good for a while, for a while, not forever. Why for a while? They can only feel good for a while because they haven’t corrected what caused it in the first place. So, it’s going to come back.
It’s no different than you going online and looking for all these SIBO products. And you go and you buy $650 worth of SIBO vitamins you get on a FODMAP diet, you feel better for two, three, four, five, six weeks, two months, and then it all comes back. So, yes, antibiotics kill SIBO, antibiotics kill the bad and the good bacteria, they wipe out SIBO. If you have done this, and if it’s couple of months out, it’s probably too late to start doing the probiotics because you may have started developing SIBO again because you haven’t corrected the thing that caused it. And then you could start taking the probiotics and then you start to bloat again, and then you’re going to go like, “What the hell is going on here?” That’s what the hell is going on there. You haven’t fixed the problem. You’re developing it again. And so, now if you take the antibiotic and the probiotics too late, now you could actually blow yourself up.
And there are probiotics out there that you can take at that time that have removed all the strains that’ll blow up your seatbelt. That is the person who just went through antibiotics that went away. It’s three or four months later. Now they’re listening to this and they’re like, :”Oh my God, I got to put probiotics in there.” And they’re going to put it in there, and then they’re going to blow up and they’re going to go like, “What do you tell me to do that for?” So, I’m telling you not to do that. But there are probiotics that have taken out the strains.
I use one called Sibiotica it’s from Apex. I’m not a show for Apex. I don’t get any money from Apex. I use lots of different companies, but that happens to be one of the primary ones that I use. And you can use that one. It’s called Sibiotica because it has taken out all the strains that would blow up SIBO, and you can start to reinoculate yourself with that. Takes a little bit longer, but still just know, even doing that is not going to stop you from not getting a SIBO again because you haven’t taken care of the things kind of upstream that have caused the SIBO in the first place.
So yes, antibiotics work, but that’s the full context of how antibiotics work and their limitation. They will eliminate the immediate infection. But that’s it. But that’s it. And if you haven’t done anything else, it’s coming back. So that Mary is my experience and my understanding, I think it’s backed up in the literature of antibiotics and their effectiveness in getting rid of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
