alt Hacker NewsSorry for your situation, or I suppose, glad to hear it's better. My understanding as a layperson is that antibiotics can be a nightmare for the gut: I don't think it's particularly likely, but you are a lot more likely to get C. diff while taking antibiotics, and I'm sure that's not the only way it can make things worse, alongside the other caveats of antibiotics (e.g. people misusing them in ways that threatens their effectiveness.) So, I can understand why doctors are not always eager to deploy antibiotics when they're not convinced they will help.
I've personally had quite some experiences navigating health issues, health anxiety, the medical system, etc. Nothing terribly interesting, but, still. I'm actually in middle of scheduling tests to see if I might, in fact, have an autoimmune condition. If they do find evidence of that, then it will have taken me around 6 years to figure it out from my very first symptoms. Thanks to modern medical science, I have little reason to sweat over it, though. (Of course, I'm still hoping for a negative, but at least in the case of a positive I can have the relief of knowing what the hell was wrong with me all this time.)
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I'm allergic to all cillins and had a spate of issues that required antibiotics 15 years ago, 3 treatments in 17 months.
I'll have to take probiotics the rest of my life. Because I'm not doing a fecal transplant, thanks. Those three times of antibiotics completely wrecked my intestines.
Finding out I had gout was a 10 year process. Apparently "full test panels" don't include uric acid tests. And whenever symptoms are aggravated, it's much harder to test for it anyway as the crystals are lodged in your bones and not in your blood stream and urine.
Now I have to go through the entire process again to rule out everything else before getting a fibromyalgia diagnosis.
Anyway antibiotics have unrelatedly literally saved my life on several occasions now and I am glad that in a few emergencies I was able to access them on the street without needing to navigate the healthcare system. Antibiotics are too tightly controlled for humans and not enough for animals.
That said, I have had to take them enough that I've definitely experienced negative gut effects a couple of times. Now I reach for probiotics after a regimen.