Blind Spots: Antibiotics

Antibiotics are healthy for you. There's no downside to them. You can take them as much as you want and they won't hurt you. This is what I learned in Medical School in 1996. And as a kid growing up in Virginia, I was given antibiotics routinely. We now know that antibiotics mess up your gut bacteria and can have negative impacts on your metabolism and increase your risk for metabolic syndrome. In kids, it can increase the risk for asthma, allergies. If a female gets antibiotics during pregnancy, it can actually affect the immune system of her child and even affect the colonization of bacteria around her. About. Around her vagina, increasing a child's risk for group B strep, which can cause meningitis. Antibiotics increase the risk for all these crazy things, and yet I was told in medical school, antibiotics are healthy. There's no downside. This is a massive blind spot in our healthcare that's been there for decades, for probably half a century. Marty Makary, in his recent book Blind Spots, talks about this in other areas in our healthcare system. How have we got it wrong, how we missed in the past? When I read books like this and I think about things like this, they make me ask the question, what am I missing today?