In this solo video, chronic‑illness specialist Dr. Diane Mueller explains that Staphylococcus bacteria commonly colonize the nose, but certain resistant strains can cause serious health issues. She distinguishes harmless nasal staph from problematic forms, focusing on MRSA and a highly resistant “evil‑twin” strain that can trigger brain fog, thyroid and adrenal dysfunction, sleep disturbances, and other systemic symptoms. Dr. Mueller describes how standard primary‑care or ENT testing often misses these resistant strains, emphasizing the need for targeted cultures and sensitivity testing, sometimes including stool cultures to detect gut colonization that can reseed the nose. Treatment options discussed include antibiotics (when sensitivity is confirmed), nasal sprays, nasal flushes, and especially nebulized therapy that delivers medication deep into sinus cavities. She advises patients to coordinate care with a physician and consider holistic testing of both nasal and gastrointestinal sites to prevent recurrence, and points viewers to her clinic information in the show notes.
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Hey everybody, Dr. Diane Mueller, chronic illness expert here, talking about how to get rid of that nose staph. So it's really common and we're going to talk first of all about what this type of nose staph will cause, some of the problems with it, and then we're going to talk about what to do with it, how to get rid of it, and all those good things. So one of the things we see is that the staph in the nose, there's different types of staph. Some types of staph are really not that big of a deal. Staph live in us, on us, in many ways we coexist with it. Other kinds of staph are big problems, right? Staph lives on our skin, but then if we get a cut, it can get infected. We can have all sorts of problems, right? We could get cellulitis. So it really just kind of depends upon certain things as far as how problematic is staph. Now, where it gets really bad is where we have these resistant forms of staph. Many people know the resistant form of staph called MRSA. MRSA commonly lives in our sinuses if we get it, and it tends to happen to immunocompromised people. So it tends to happen when we are, say, in a hospital and we are there for a surgery and are a little immunocompromised because that's what happens when we go into surgery. And then all of a sudden you wind up getting this infection. But there's another type of staph that is called MRSA, which I call it MRSA's evil twin sibling, because MRSA is also something that happens to us. It's also a staph infection we get when we're immunocompromised. However, one of the things that happens with MRSA is we wind up seeing that it can actually cause brain fog. It can cause problems with the thyroid, the adrenals, sleep, and so many other problems. Now, I tend to find that while a lot of forms of staph are very responsive to antibiotics, marcons, kind of like its evil twin sibling MRSA, is pretty resistant to antibiotics. So it can be very difficult to have antibiotics greatly help for the treatment of the staph. So I'm not saying they don't work, but it is one of the most resistant forms of bacteria that I see in my clinical practice. So there are nasal sprays. So anytime you get this type of staph run and you have it positive, you have to specifically ask for it because classically a primary care is not going to test for a MRSA type of staph. Even ENTs won't test for it. A lot of ENTs don't even know what this type of sac is. But as I said, it's very, very disruptive to the body. So when you're getting this type of sac, like, like addressed and you actually find it, you properly have it diagnosed, then the next step, of course, is treating it. So when they— when they take the sample, they culture it, which means they grow it on a petri dish and they see what sort of antibiotics actually, you know, actually respond to it. When this happens, what we can wind up doing is we can wind up at that point deciding that, okay, we're going to do an antibiotic because it will show you what antibiotic it is sensitive to on the test. Now, the problem is even a lot of the antibiotics that are sensitive to it, they don't work. So I have found that nasal sprays can help and nasal flushes can help. But one of the best treatments I've seen for this type of staph is actually a nebulizer. So always run these ideas by your doctor, right? But the idea of a nebulizer is it's like that steam inhalation that a lot of asthmatics use. And so you put the medicine into like a steam and when you're breathing it in, it actually is gonna get very far back in your sinus cavities. Another thing that I've seen that sometimes makes it difficult to clear staph is if we're co— is it coexists in our gastrointestinal tract. I see a lot of staph when I eat stool cultures in people's stool, and that basically means that you have a staph infection in your, somewhere in your gastrointestinal tract. And we can actually pass back and forth microorganisms from our nasal sinus to our gastrointestinal tract. So sometimes what will happen is one area of the body is treated and another area is not, and it just comes back. So if you see that for yourself and you see recurrent staph infections, it's really worth considering something like a very holistic blood, yes, stool culture. So you can actually see, is it also in your guts? And then treat both the nasal area and the gut area simultaneous— simultaneously so that we do not continue to pass these microorganisms back. Like I said, the staph, like, we think of it for things like abscess and cellulitis, right, and MRSA, some of these types of things. But I do see links to things like thyroid problems, adrenal problems, sleep, and otherwise. So we do know the staph that colonizes, that lives in that nasal cavity, could actually cause a lot more than just sinus problem. Although, of course, it'll cause those things too. So please do look in the show notes for information on how to join my clinic if this has been helpful. And I wish you all the best health. Ciao for now.
