Gut Health

Antibiotic Resistance: Here's Why we Could be Entering a Post-Antibiotic World (PODCAST)

We were honored to be featured on another amazing episode of Healing Quest Radio with hosts Roy Walkenhorst and Judy Brooks. 

Below is the interview and a link to the podcast. Enjoy getting educated on this very important epidemic!

Roy Walkenhorst: Hello, and welcome back to Healing Quest, I'm Roy Walkenhorst.

Judy Brooks: And I'm Judy Brooks. You know, our focus here on Healing Quest is optimum health and integrating medicine. And one of the scariest developments in the health world in recent years has been the emergence of bacteria that are like resistant to antibiotics. So we've talked about it here on many occasions. And it's a growing concern. But now, a potential all-natural solution to part of the problem just maybe be emerging.

Roy Walkenhorst: It comes in the form of something else you've heard us talk a lot about here. A probiotic. So it may be turning out that probiotics not only keep our digestive system healthy and do all kinds of other wonderful things for us, they may also be disease fighters against some really scary diseases like staph infections, also known as MRSA. Which can be life-threatening. I mean, in fact, 53% of staph or MRSA infections in the U.S. right now are resistant to antibiotics.

Judy Brooks: So we've asked microbiologist Kiran Krishnan from Just Thrive Probiotics to discuss what he thinks could be a major development in natural health. So, Karen, thanks so much for joining us today.

Kiran Krishnan: Always a pleasure to be with you guys. Thank you for having me.

Roy Walkenhorst: So, how big a deal do you think this is?

Kiran Krishnan: It's absolutely huge. As a microbiologist or anyone who's in the clinical space, one of the scariest notions is that we may end up living in a post-antibiotic world.

Judy Brooks: Oh my goodness.

Kiran Krishnan: You know, antibiotics can be argued to be one of the most profound discoveries in medicine. Like the discovery of penicillin and beyond. And we have in the world of science where ... Like people denote in culture a before Christ and after Christ as the way you measure, you know, major events ... We measure major events as a pre-antibiotic and post-antibiotic world.

Kiran Krishnan: Right. So pre-antibiotic discovery, the vast majority of people died from bacterial infections. And it was simple stuff. It was dysentery. You'd get a simple gut infection and you would die. You'd get a sinus infection and you would die. You would step on a thorn and get a little infection in your foot and you'd end up dying from that. All of those things became a non-issue once we discovered antibiotics.

Kiran Krishnan: Once you've discovered antibiotics and all of those deaths from those simple infections that cause havoc in the population, all of those were alleviated. But then we went full board the other way, where we're using antibiotics for everything and overusing it quite dramatically. Even the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, has a program out to urgent care/primary care physicians to try to reduce the number of antibiotic prescriptions by over 50% in the next few years.

Roy Walkenhorst: Wow. Wow.

Kiran Krishnan: Right? So even the Center for Disease Control is saying, "Hey, we are writing way too many antibiotic prescriptions typically for non-bacterial infections." And that's why we end up with all of these resistant issues. And if we become colonized by bacteria that are resistant to all modern day antibiotics, we could