LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

upper respiratory tract infection

Do I Need Antibiotics When Hacking Up Discolored Sputum?

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You’re hacking up a lung and coworkers won’t come within 5 feet of you without a mask and a pump sprayer of Lysol.

Worse, you’re now coughing up sputum that has become the color of something out of the Exorcist.  It’s no longer time to mess around-you need antibiotics.  Stat.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this statement.  Somehow, when your sputum gets some type of yellow or greenish color to it, you think it’s a sign of something sinister that’s going to need antibiotics.  Something you need to understand first–sputum is essentially sterile.  It is the end result of your white blood cells attacking and destroying an invader.  The color is usually a result of dead cells of the airway as well as inflammatory cells.  While bacteria can be present in the sputum, this is not always the case.

All of this brings me to this particular study.  In it, researchers looked at the effect of the use of either anti-inflammatories (600 mg ibuprofen 3x / day), antibiotics (amoxicillin-clavulanic acid 500 mg/125 mg 3x / day) or a placebo had on the time it took to resolve an infection that included discolored sputum.  The results may surprise you.  Here’s what the researchers found:

  1. The number of days with frequent cough was slightly lower among patients assigned to ibuprofen (9 days compared to 11 days with antibiotics and placebo)
  2. Neither antibiotics nor ibuprofen increased cough resolution compared with placebo.
  3. Side effects were most common in the antibiotic group (12%) than ibuprofen (5%) or placebo (3%).

Overall, this should blow the myth that discolored sputum is a sign that it is time to run to the doctor and get on antibiotics.  Regular readers of the Rantings should have a very good idea of how much this single course of, arguably uneeded, antibiotics will destroy the healthy balance of the bacteria in your gut.

Instead, opt for immune boosting activities like light exercise, vitamin D and A (although hopefully, you have already been taking these and did not get sick in the first place), no refined carbs and high doses of vitamin C (8-10 grams per day).  The healthy bacteria in your gut and the balance they confer to your immune system will thank you.

Approach to Upper Respiratory Tract Infection Care for This Century – (08-17-00)

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Approach to Upper Respiratory Tract Infection Care for This Century

This is an interesting article delving into why antibiotics are still used for URT infections despite the evidence suggesting that there are no benefits. Pay careful attention to the line where the author suggests that many doctors continue to prescribe antibiotics for a condition they know it will not benefit because it won’t harm. The author (and myself included) suggest that the use is harmful.

Read entire article here

TAKE THIS FOR COLD AND FLU SEASON

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If you pay attention to the ads on TV, the second you get a sniffle you should run to Walgreens and down half a bottom of nightime-this or daytime-that. Symptom suppression is the name of the game. If that fails, resort to antibiotics.  But what if the answer is exactly the opposite?

By now almost everyone has heard about probiotics. Many times it may only be a rudimentary understanding that yogurt contains some type of bacteria in it that is good for you. 

The reality is that, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, our bodies have developed a mutually beneficial relationship (called commensal) with the bacteria in our gut. The benefits to us are immense. Protection from nasty beings trying to infect us, detoxification of toxins from the environment, balancing of our immune system, production of certain vitamins like B12…the list is longer, but you get the idea.

The balancing of the immune system as well as the guarding of our gut and pharynx from competing viruses, bacteria and yeast clearly has the potential to lower our risk of infection. And sure enough, multiple studies have found this to be the case.

This particular review, done by the Cochrane Collaboration, which is a mutlinational think tank that evaluates medical research, continues to support the use of probiotics to lower the risk of an upper respiratory tract infection. In general, taking probiotics lowered the risk of getting an infection by 42% and, in conjunction, lowered the use of antibiotics in the studies. Not too shabby, especially considering that there is nothing, nada, zip, zilch in the armamentarium of mainstream medicine to support immune function and lower our risk of getting sick.

Now for my two cents…

If you are going to take probiotics, make sure that the levels are high enough. These are usually measured in colony forming units (CFU). Yogurt is not going to get you there.  The brand we recommend for routine use has 20 billion CFU / capsule. Make sure you read the label as many brands have much lower levels.

The jury on exactly what strains to take for what condition is still out (and probably will never reconvene, so don’t wait for it…), so a broad spectrum probiotic is best.