The right antibiotic at the right time has been the difference between life and death during innumerable bacterial infections since they came into wide use during World War II. Fantastic as these drugs can be against bacterial infections though, they don’t help get rid of viral infections at all.
If you stock some antibiotics against a time when they are hard to get (as many preppers do), you absolutely would not want to waste them on conditions for which they weren’t helpful. But how could you tell the difference? Not being a physician myself (and therefore not giving you medical advice), I hit up the medical literature for suggestions on how to recognize when an infection is likely to be viral rather than bacterial.
What’s the difference between viral and bacterial, anyway?
Bacteria are independent living cells. They are different from our cells — much more metabolically capable, actually, in many cases. That means the bacteria have metabolic pathways we don’t use. Antibiotics exploit these differences by poisoning pathways bacteria need, but our cells don’t have.
Viruses are not complete living cells; they’re much simpler particles that parasitize our cells and trick our cells into making more viruses. Viruses don’t use the metabolic pathways the antibiotics poison, so viral diseases aren’t affected by antibiotics.
The big thing on the lower right is a bacterium. The small bright things are the viruses working on parasitizing the bacterium. You see the size difference; viruses just don’t have much metabolism for drugs to interfere with.**
Most viral diseases just have to be left for the victim’s immune system to get rid of. Tamiflu will shorten the course of some of them, but it’s not the amazing cure that the right antibiotic can be against bacteria.
Upper respiratory infections are usually viral
Colds and flu of course make up most of the upper respiratory infections, and these are viral in origin. Unless there’s some reason to particularly suspect a bacterium, these wouldn’t be good targets for antibiotics. When is it a sinusitis or ear infection or pneumonia that needs antibiotics? Here are some tips: (1)
- Symptoms last longer than a normal cold or flu. (For kids, more than 10-14 days; a little less for adults)
- Fever is more than low grade. Colds may only a degree or two of fever if that. Flu has more; and also has more body aches. The higher the fever the more likely it’s bacterial. I get suspicious when the fever’s over 102 F.
- If the fever gets worse a few days into the illness, it may be a sign that a viral infection has allowed a bacterial infection to join it.
- Ear pain is more likely from bacterial infection.
High fevers are more likely to mean bacteria and antibiotics; low grade fevers are more likely viral problems.*
Pneumonia is more likely viral, but not overwhelmingly so
Among children at least, pneumonia was completely viral in about half the cases, and viral with some later bacterial complication in 25%. Only 15% started out bacterial and the rest were undetermined. (3) Adult cases were even more heavily weighted toward viral causes. (4)
Pneumonia is also more likely to be viral if the temperature is not very elevated (2), and if the pneumonia included a cough (4).
Urinary tract infections are more likely bacterial
Unlike most of the other infections in this piece, urinary tract infections aren’t usually caught directly from another sick person. They’re more likely to come from bacteria on the surface of the body that migrate up into the bladder, and maybe higher. Burning pain on urination is the biggest clue of these problems. Small children, women, and elderly men are most often affected.
When one of these shows up, it’s not very likely viral. The bacterium E. coli is the most common agent. Other bacteria are also common causes. Viruses can cause this problem, but it’s a minority of cases.
If it’s viral, antibiotics are worse than just wasteful
We’ve hit this topic before (here and here, for example) but it bears repeating: Taking antibiotics when you don’t need them does more harm than just wasting antibiotics. Here are some reasons not to take antibiotics for viral problems, or taking the wrong kind or amount of antibiotic:
- Development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
- Destruction of helpful microbes. This most often expresses as diarrhea.
- Other side effects peculiar to the antibiotic used.
Silver is, by definition, not a heavy metal.
“The metals that I have seen referred to as heavy metals comprise a block of all the metals in Groups 3 to 16 that are in periods 4 and greater. This seems to be a definition that should be generally useful. It may also be stated as the transition and post-transition metals. These acquired the name heavy metals because they all have high densities, but the usefulness of the term is related to their chemistry, not their density.
Source, with more info: https://www.silvermedicine.org/silver-heavy-metal.html
Ray
Ray, the source you cite ends up claiming ‘heavy metals’ isn’t really a useful term. Ok, any term with so much disagreement as to its meaning isn’t useful. It also says silver isn’t toxic in the same way as mercury and cadmium. Good. Does silver, however, substitute for other monovalent cations in biological reactions? Such substitutions are common when unusual amounts of naturally occurring metals are introduced into living systems. Those substitutions tend to be harmful. The silver deposition in the skin that’s a known side effect of taking silver by mouth shows it’s participating in *some* redox reaction(s). As I said, other people may choose differently, but I am not comfortable with that risk ratio when the studies that *have* been done have failed to find significant value for the treatments, or any theoretical reason why silver should work as an internal treatment.
There is no known biochemical use for silver inside the human. Taking such things by mouth hoping that it will discourage disease has not been a fruitful approach for any other compound I can think of with no natural internal biological activity, so it seems a poor bet to assume it would do so for silver. Sure, it inhibits microbes in the outside world. So do lots of things that don’t belong in a human body.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree, but I want to thank you for allowing a different perspective being posted. I understand your points, and for the most part I agree with you. But as with raw milk and CBD oil, there isn’t any scientific study because there is no way to create a patentable product, and so no scientific research is being or will be done.
We don’t get the big, expensive, high-quality studies the FDA would demand nearly as much, and that’s a problem. But there’s *some* research out there…it’s out there now for silver. Not definitive studies, small and often in nonhumans; but more than nothing. The results really haven’t looked good.