How and Why Herbal Antibiotics Work--And Why You Should Care

You should care about herbal medicines, because eventually your antibiotic supply is going to be exhausted, and China may not be interested in re-supplying you. Not only that, but bacteria develop resistance to those industrial pharmaceuticals sooner or later. And if the Big Pharma antibiotics are all you have against a mutated superbug, you are out of luck. The way herbal antibiotics work, resistance is highly unlikely. Futile, even. I like it. You will also.

Let's begin with a few facts shared by the nice folks at the Centers for Disease Control:

• In 1900, more than 30% of all deaths were among children under the age of five years. By contrast, in 1997 only 1.4% of all deaths were in children under the age of five. Think about it. How many people do you know who have buried a young child? (Stillbirths and miscarriages do not count here.) And yet, historically, women knew they would bury one-third of their children. 
• In 1900, more than 33% of all deaths were due to pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections. All communicable, and primarily bacterial, diseases. Forty percent of these deaths were in small children.  
• In 2014, more than two million Americans acquired antibiotic-resistant infections. More than 23,000 died. In 2019, those numbers were 2.8 million and 35,000, for about a 50 percent increase in 5 years.
  

These diseases against which modern medicine has made so much progress, so much so that they now cause fewer than five percent of deaths in this country, will become commonplace again. Childhood mortality rates will skyrocket back to their historic levels of thirty to forty percent. That's whether you like it or not. The only say you have in the matter is whether you prepare to do something about it. Whether you prepare so that your children and grandchildren are not part of that group. No one else is going to do it for you. No one is buying amoxicillin or ciprofloxacin for you. No one is learning plant medicine for you. Doctors as a whole eschew natural remedies; they will not be a resource. 

You have to learn, like it or not. Or bury your children, like it or not.

And believe me or not, now is the time to prepare. It's never been easier. Information that used to take years to gather from around the world is at your fingertips in less than a second, and in color.

To begin understanding how herbal antibiotics work, it's necessary to learn what bacteria are. Bacteria are single-cell organisms that live everywhere on earth--hot places, cold places, dry and wet places, radioactive places. They make cheese and sauerkraut. They live in and on us whether we like it (helping us digest food and making vitamin B12) or not (killing us through pneumonia or tetanus). There are trillions of bacteria in the human body, most of which are doing their jobs and doing them well. Further discussion will be limited to those that are out to kill us.

Antibiotics work to kill bacteria in a few different ways. What follows is a grossly simplified explanation but satisfactory for our purposes.

• Antibiotics attack the cell wall until it ruptures. They make a hole in the wall and the innards all leak out. The bacterium dies before it has any chance to repair itself. It all sounds pretty gory and R-rated. 
• Or the antibiotics really scrub the cytoplasmic membrane and let bacterially-undesirable things in. Rated G.  
• Some antibiotics interfere with bacterial replication. There's too much going on. The bacteria can't get any privacy. They can't reproduce. They just grow old and die without having any children. Rated PG.  
• Other antibiotics interfere with protein synthesis and DNA repair and replication. The bacteria can't grow and develop. They are totally stunted and just stay that age and die. Rated G.
  

Industrial pharmaceuticals are all developed to act in a very specific, isolated manner. When researchers study plants, they do so to identify the best, strongest chemical compound in there, isolate it, and use it alone to treat a disease. In the case of antibiotics, they want the silver bullet that will blow a hole in the bacterial cell wall or prevent reproduction or prevent protein synthesis. And this is because each pharmaceutical corporation is accountable to its stockholders. So they have to find the most effective chemical compound. One that they can patent and sell for the greatest profit. They can't patent plants, so there is no money in using the whole plant.

They need that one compound, acting like a sniper, that has all the guts and will get all the glory. Like penicillin did for a while.

Until the bacteria figure out a way to defeat the enemy. And when it comes to Big Pharma antibiotics, they always do. See, bacteria are very social, cooperative creatures. Like extroverts on steroids. Not only do they eventually figure out a way to defeat the enemy, but then they scatter far and wide to teach other bacteria of their own kind and entirely different species, how to use the knowledge they have acquired to defeat other enemies. (Yes, recent studies have revealed that they actually do that. Super fascinating stuff to read about, but not really essential to our discussion here.)

However, plants work much differently than pills. Plant chemistry is exceedingly complex. Rather than the single silver bullet of a lab-engineered pharmaceutical, plants have dozens to hundreds of naturally-occurring, distinct chemical compounds. It is virtually impossible for bacteria to develop resistance to them. These botanical compounds not only take a team approach to defeating the bacteria, but they also have other substances that promote healing, provide pain relief, reduce inflammation, and so on to hasten recovery. And when these herbs are combined with others, there's really no way for the bacteria to survive.

Fortunately for us, plants are free to grow and harvest for making medicine. And anybody can do it. (The federal government hasn't outlawed this yet, though harvesting in national parks is illegal). It doesn't take medical school or being a pharmacist to use them, though being aware of drug interactions is essential. Plants are generally much safer than conventional alternatives with fewer side effects. Contrast that with the staggering numbers of people harmed and killed by conventional pharmaceuticals. Adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the US. Yet we hear little about it. Were the same to be true of herbals, there would be no end to the hysteria in the media.

And you don't need to learn hundreds of different herbs. Learn about what grows in your area and start using them now to become familiar with them. With ten or so local herbs, you'll be set to care for a lot of your personal needs. Make sure you have a couple of systemic antibiotics like Usnea and juniper. Maybe throw in some blackberry and barberry. You undoubtedly already have sugar and honey which are great topical antibiotics for wounds. Add in a few more that are local to your area or specific to conditions that afflict you. This isn't rocket science. You can do it!

You must do it.


Links to related posts:
Herbal Antibiotics book review
Usnea
Juniper
Blackberry
Barberry
Sugar
Honey

For further reading:
https://www.healthline.com/health/how-do-antibiotics-work#effectiveuse
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159373/#b2-pmc-6-2014-025 
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm https://www.dzif.de/en/could-green-tea-hold-key-reducing-antibiotic-resistance
https://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/medication/question882.htm

12.9.19