Antibiotics and Vitamins can be a very bad combinations, or very good ones. One thing is for sure, if you are taking both antibiotics and vitamins, you REALLY need to know if there are any bad interactions with your meds.
We did an earlier post here at 3BY (CLICKY) about bad interactions between vitamins and antibiotics, so it’s clear you don’t just want to shove in some multivitamins whenever you take antibiotics and hope for the best. However, some combinations work great.
Antibiotics have saved more lives than anything medical advance except good hygiene. They’ve also killed people or been totally worthless when used incorrectly. If you’re planning to do your own dosing if other medical care becomes available, you’d best know how.
Please note; I’m not a physician and am not advising you to do anything. I’m offering information.
Make use of good combinations of antibiotics and vitamins
Which vitamins to take when using antibiotics? Your choice can help or hurt, so choose wisely.
Some great combinations I found by researching medical literature
Vitamin A enhanced the effectiveness of doxycycline and streptomycin
When doxycycline and streptomycin were the antibiotics used to treat brucellosis, the people stayed cured more often when they were also given Vit A supplements.(1) Brucellosis is a bacterial infection common in livestock that can be picked up by people in contact with the livestock, then shared among people. It’s one of the germs that germ warfare people are concerned with, as it is considered to be ‘weaponizable’. The Vitamin A dose given was about 25x the recommended minimum, so they used the carotenoid (made from organic pigments that are produced by plants and algae, as well as several bacteria and fungi) form of the vitamin, safer than the retinol (retinal and retinoic acids are found in animal sources such as liver, kidney, eggs, and dairy products) forms in high doses.
Vitamin C made amoxicillin work better, and kept microbes from developing resistance against some antibiotics.
By itself, Vitamin C supplementation didn’t do much for H. pylori infections, the kind that cause stomach ulcers.(2) However, when the patients were given the usual treatments for these infections, amoxicillin and a drug to reduce acid production, they did much better clearing the infection if they took a generous dose of Vitamin C too.(3)
Also, when fighting respiratory infections caused by P. aeuruginosa, megadoses of Vitamin C seemed to keep the microbes from becoming resistant to kanamycin, streptomycin, and especially tetracyclines.(4) Chloramphenicol treatment actually failed more often with the Vitamin C though, and some other antibiotics got no particular help; so specifics matter.
Vitamin D made people require less antibiotics
This vitamin is used by the immune system, and many people are deficient in it. It’s particularly true in winter, as sunlight on the skin helps the body produce its own. Strictly speaking, this doesn’t belong in this article because Vit D seems to more reduce the need for antibiotics than help them work (5), but I couldn’t resist mentioning it because getting enough is important. I plan to talk more about the upsides and downsides of vitamin supplementation in a later post, but getting enough D is a good thing.
What should you do with vitamins and antibiotics in combination? You do whatever you think best. What I’m going to do is not take general supplements when taking antibiotics, because some things, particularly the minerals found along with the vitamins in many supplements and the B vitamins themselves, interfere with the antibiotics. However, I will load up on the particular vitamins found to be cooperative when I’m taking the particular antibiotics they pair well with. I’ll have my streptomycin with a side of Vitamin A, thanks. I’ll also be sure to get enough Vitamin D, especially in winter.
Two other Big Deals for getting the most from your antibiotics
These repeat some information found elsewhere on this site and beyond, but they’re so very important I felt I had to put them here too:
Point 1: Choose the right antibiotic
Not every antibiotic works well on every kind of infection. Choosing the wrong one is useless and wasteful, and potentially dangerous as you’re not giving the right one at the same time, and even useless drugs have negative side effects.
So how do you know which to pick? I keep a reference on hand. My choice is Where There Is No Doctor, which you can find here as a .pdf or buy as a hard copy (recommended) wherever you order books from. (How have I *not* reviewed this great resource yet?? Coming soon!) . Make sure your source also includes dosing instructions; it makes a big difference.
Point 2: Get the dosage right
Tempting as it would be to save precious antibiotics, not taking a full course is downright harmful. It just teaches the microbes to resist the antibiotic, so they come back with redoubled force and tenacity. The source you keep in your preps for choosing the right drug should also tell you how much to give and by what method. Salty and I know this topic to be so important we’ve done both a podcast version (CLICKY) and a related but not identical post (CLICKY).
(1) Salehi, M., Salehi, H., Salehi, M. M., & Salehi, M. (2014). Comparison between antibiotic therapy of Brucellosis with and without vitamin A. Advanced Biomedical Research, 3, 245. http://doi.org/10.4103/2277-9175.146365
(2) Gail, M. H., Pfeiffer, R. M., Brown, L. M., Zhang, L., Ma, J., Pan, K., . . . You, W. (2007). Garlic, vitamin, and antibiotic treatment for helicobacter pylori: A randomized factorial controlled trial. Helicobacter, 12(5), 575-578. doi:10.1111/j.1523-5378.2007.00528.x
(3) Jarosz, M., Dabrowska-Ufniarz, E., & Dzieniszewski, J. (2001). Eradication of H. pylori using one-week therapy combining PPI with antibiotics and vitamin C. Gut, 49(4), A69.
(4) Cursino, Luciana, Chartone-Souza, Edmar, & Nascimento, Andréa Maria Amaral. (2005). Synergic interaction between ascorbic acid and antibiotics against Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Brazilian Archives of Biology and Technology, 48(3), 379-384. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1516-89132005000300007
(5) Norlin, A., Hansen, S., Wahren-Borgström, E., Granert, C., Björkhem-Bergman, L., & Bergman, P. (2016). Vitamin D3 supplementation and antibiotic consumption – results from a prospective, observational study at an immune-deficiency unit in sweden. Plos One, 11(9), e0163451. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0163451
