How Phase 2 Biofilms Form and How To STOP IT | Dr. A Explains

One of the more popular videos that we've done was about biofilms and especially phase 2 biofilms. I gave the spectrum of biofilms and we got questions about, well, how do they form and all of that business? Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my channel. I've been involved in teaching and researching in the integrative and naturopathic medical communities for 30 years, and this channel is about answering questions that I get. Just to remind you, biofilms have a spectrum. There's one end of the spectrum, which are normal biofilms. Every mammal has them. They're in the ocean. They're all over any wet place, right? So we have normal biofilms, just like we have normal bacteria that are good for us in our GI tract. Then we have a spectrum of pathological or damaging biofilms, and we have taken to this terminology of dividing them into phase 1 and phase 2 biofilms. So what those mean are that biofilms can develop in a spectrum and get thicker and be a stronger, like a hive almost, or a hiding place for the microbes on the inside. Once we get past the normal ones, we tend to talk about phase 1 as early and phase 2 as later. But the way you can think about it is phase 1 are not good for you. They're pathogenic, but they're sort of kind of like a regular stick-built house. Whereas phase 2 biofilms are like a skyscraper. There's a lot more infrastructure. And then you can have all sorts of kind of unfriendly bacteria, viruses, fungus, parasites. They can all live together in there. And then the biofilm, the longer it's been there, becomes its own kind of multi-familied microenvironment. Yeah. So that's the spectrum thing. Now, the phase 2 ones, the ones that are more like skyscrapers, people will ask, well, how did I get those, number one? And do I always have to go from normal to phase 1 to phase 2? Good questions. So the first thing is normally they do build. And what you get usually is not so much that the normal ones turn bad on you, it's that you get imbalances in the GI flora commonly. And there are some bugs, so to speak, especially bacteria that are known to create Biofilms. So there are certain, for example, types of staph that staph bacteria that will grow these pseudomonas will grow them whole host of other things. Now a lot of times we have these bugs in small population quantities in our GI tract and they're not doing anything. But let's say you get a whole bunch of antibiotics or you get chemotherapy or you're just really sick for a long time. What will happen is that the bugs in the small quantities will start to overgrow and they'll take the place of your good bacteria that you killed. with, you know, a drug or being sick a long time or whatever. So then if you have a higher and higher quantity of a biofilm-creating bacteria, for example, other things can make biofilm, then what'll happen is they start to make biofilms because that's what they do. They're trying to protect themselves because now they're taking over the neighborhood. And so what goes on then is they're building these things and then other, you can call them inappropriate or pathogenic organisms, whether they're fungal or viral or bacterial or whatever, can get in there. And like I say, they all work and live as a hive. They can even trade DNA with one another. So as you go, the longer you are sick, the bigger the biofilm gets. So you tend to go from none to lower-grade phase 1 things. And then if they don't get sort of disrupted, you go to phase 2 things. Now, interestingly, something that can disrupt phase 1 biofilms are anti-infective things. So antibiotics sometimes actually will disrupt biofilms. Anti-infective herbal extracts, especially your aromatic herbs like, you know, oregano and things like that. Interesting. are known to disrupt biofilms and a whole number of other things. So sometimes the phase 1s don't go anywhere because you got other treatment, right? But let's say you had a long kind of bout and maybe you needed a lot of antibiotics, or maybe you went through chemotherapy, you had some immune suppression, or as I said, you've just been sick a long time. The ecology of the GI tract may not have got back to normal. And so now the phase 1 biofilms have added on, and then there's some that are these big phase 2 ones. Now clinically, what we see with those is they often will not respond to what we would call more phase 1 type biofilm treatments. The way that we see this often clinically is a person maybe clinically is working with somebody, and you know, you can test for biofilms in research and you can look at them under the microscope. And in a lot of like oral surgery research, dental research, they'll actually take them out and look under the microscope and all that stuff. But in your gut, it's A little bit more difficult. But if you have resistant infections and it's hard to get your gut, you know, kind of back online, you've got chronic infections. A lot of times people will take phase one biofilm type agents and they'll they'll get a little ways and then they they just kind of plateau. This also happens in your overgrowth syndromes like small intestinal bacterial and fungal fungal overgrowth, SIBO and SIFO. It's an empiric treatment often where we see the patient and they've kind of plateaued, where we say, well, what do we need to do to get to a bigger, heavier level of biofilm intervention. And what we need to do usually there is something heavier duty, that member that's more like a skyscraper, that will go in and kind of put wedges into the biofilm and pry it open so that the immune system can see in, literally. Well, when we see that, what we will often see is we'll use more of a phase 2 biofilm agent, and the person in the average— I've seen both ends of the spectrum, but the average case, somewhere between 2 days and 2 weeks with a phase 2 biofilm agent, the person will wind up starting to have symptoms again that they weren't having before. Maybe they'd never had them, or maybe they hadn't had them in a long time. And what that comes from is the phase 2 biofilm agents are made to kind of wedge into these bigger biofilms, and then the immune system sees these bugs that it hasn't seen because they've been hiding in the biofilm, and then the immune system, you know, has a little overcorrection, kind of a freakout really. And so you may get symptoms. They may be GI symptoms. You may have systemic symptoms where you feel your joints are inflamed. We've had people with neuropsychiatric aggravations, especially in PANS and PANDAS patients that we see that a lot, but really anybody can get that, all manner of things. And so here's the bottom line. If a person is taking a phase 2, a higher-grade biofilm agent, which there are some supplements that do it and there's some drugs that do it as well, if they're taking those and then they get these rebound symptoms, it's not that the agent, the drug or supplements or whatever, was bad. It's that it's opening the biofilm up and now you need support to come in and help manage the infections that were already there that you couldn't see, your immune system couldn't see. So that's kind of the big picture of how do we get to phase 2 biofilms. Now I'm going to do a follow-up to this one where I get a little bit more into the support side of phase 2 biofilms. So what do we do if you have the patient where phase 1 treatment plateaus, you'd start phase 2 treatment, and then all of a sudden their joints are swelling, or all of a sudden their gut is crazy, or all of a sudden, you know, a million other things are happening? We'll get into that in a Another video. Good seeing you. I'm Dr. A. Please like, share, subscribe if you found this helpful. Really, we love it. People sharing it. YouTube community is growing a lot like crazy. Welcome everybody who's new, and thank you anyone who's been here for a while. I'll see you all in the next video.