Medical researchers have been sounding the alarm for quite some time, but few of us have been listening: If we don’t find a way to curb overuse of antibiotics, we’ll find ourselves in a pre-antibiotic world. Most of us don’t really remember what that was like because we were born after the discovery of penicillin and the development of a broad spectrum of other antibiotics. But we may come to look at the years between 1940 and 2010 as the Age of Antibiotics. Before and after, not so much.

 

Recently, my husband Richard stepped through a rotten board on a recycled deck we’ve been meaning to tear out and replace. He bruised himself up pretty good, but the only broken skin was a bit of road rash—some superficial scrapes that we cleaned immediately and thoroughly with warm, soapy water (many health care providers no longer recommend using hydrogen peroxide as it can cause cell and tissue damage). We kept it clean and had a couple of different health care providers take a look at it; it appeared to be healing up just fine when we took off for a vacation to Mono Lake and Southern California. We went for a couple of hikes in the back country, and the night of the second one, I noticed that the final remaining scab on Richard’s leg didn’t seem to be getting smaller; it had gotten a little bigger.

 

I soaked it in warm salt water, in hopes of drawing out whatever infection this spot might be harboring, but by the second day of doing this, it became evident that it wasn’t enough. Richard’s leg was clearly infected. Fortunately, we were now in San Diego for a family reunion, and Scripps has a 24-hour urgent care clinic; so we checked Richard in and they proceeded to give him IV antibiotics for the next two days, which got the infection under control.

 

 

After the weekend, his leg appeared to improve dramatically. The wound began to drain, the scabs came off, and the red area shrank noticeably. Relieved, we figured we had it on the run and were hopeful that Richard wouldn’t have to go back on IV antibiotics. But then one day, a day after errands kept me away from home all afternoon so that I couldn’t manage the level of care I had been, the redness started to spread once again.

 

This freaked me out enough that I had Richard make an appointment with his health care provider to see if maybe we should make arrangements with a home health agency to administer IV antibiotics at home. The main difference in care seemed to be not putting the poultice on the wound, so I jumped on that, and after two of them, the infection once again started to shrink dramatically. By the time we got to his appointment, it was looking very good and healing nicely once again.

 

I don’t think the poultice would have done enough on its own; but it seemed to reduce the microbial load enough for oral antibiotics to work. And with this infection, it appeared that oral antibiotics weren’t quite cutting it on their own. Which is disturbing. This was just “regular” staph, and it took three tries to get an oral antibiotic that was effective enough, and even then, only with some supportive measures.

 

For anyone who’s interested, here are the supportive measure we took:

 

• 500 mgs of vitamin C, twice a day

 

• 50 mgs of zinc, once a day

 

• Herb Pharm’s liquid Echinacea (this company prepares the tincture so that all active ingredients are present, both the water and alcohol-soluble ones) two droppers in a few ounces of water three times a day

 

• Homeopathic Arnica (actually, Richard took Bioenergetics’ Body Mend, Inflammation, and Tissue Salts drops; I find this company’s preparations to be amazing in their efficacy; the Tissue Salts drops are an immune system booster), three times a day

 

• A raw onion poultice placed on the wound three times a day for two hours or so. I took a yellow onion, peeled off all outer layers until I got to a clean layer, then rinsed it and washed my hands thoroughly. I cut off a generous slice of clean onion and chopped it fine on a cutting board I don’t use much for anything else. I placed the chopped onion the middle of a clean cotton cloth (pieces of old, washed sheet), then I folded the edges to make a little packet and arranged the whole thing over the wound and kept it in place with an Ace bandage.

 

• When I removed the poultice, I threw it away, then soaked Richard’s leg in warm salt water for about five minutes or so (using a bowl of warm salt water and a wash cloth). Then we washed his leg with soap and warm water in the bath tub.

 

• We kept his leg elevated so that it could drain toward his heart and have his circulatory and immune system work together to clean up the area internally.

 

• I made up an essential oil mixture of 1 tsp carrier oil (hazelnut in this case, but sweet almond oil or grape seed oil would be fine) and added one drop of the following medicinal quality antibacterial essential oils: Clove, Eucalyptus, Geranium, Lavender, Oregano, and Thyme. I rubbed some into the soles of Richard’s feet three times a day.

 

•  We made sure that Richard had plenty of friendly bacteria in his system to help combat the unfriendly ones. He ate yogurt with live cultures three times a day and took a probiotic supplement twice a day.

 

When the infection was really bad, I think all these measures, in addition to the antibiotics, were helpful. We needed to call in the reinforcements and get Richard’s immune system as strong and responsive as possible to fight the infection. And the poultice really did impress me with its ability to draw the infection out. If somebody were to do only one of these things, I would recommend the poultice (along with elevation). And there is a type of honey, Medi Honey, that is being used on stubborn wounds that refuse to heal. It’s more established in other countries, but it is gaining some use, now, in the U.S. You could ask your health care provider about it.

 

If you have a staph infection, do not attempt to treat it on your own. These infections can get out of hand very fast, and they can be lethal. Respiratory infections are getting a little funky these days, too. When checking in with a good friend after our return from our vacation, I found out that she had had to go through three different antibiotics in treating a bronchial infection. A year previously, a friend of a friend had ended up in a coma after contracting MRSA in his lungs. He recovered eventually, but not without brain damage.

 

The danger of contracting MRSA from school locker rooms and fitness clubs has been a concern for the last one or two years now, and hospitals are known repositories for MRSA. When Richard was in the hospital a while back and I brought him a blanket from home to give him a little comfort, one of the nurses told me she wouldn’t bring anything she cared about made from fabric to a hospital because of superbugs. A surgeon friend has told us about entire hospital wings closed down because of contamination with MRSA.

 

If the dread day we’ve been warned about hasn’t already arrived, it’s not far off. Yet, far from cutting back on the personal and commercial use of antibiotics, individuals, companies, and institutions have broadened their use of anti-bacterial products. In my next post, I’ll discuss the ways in which antibiotics are being overused and misused, and I’ll talk about some steps that we can take in order to reduce this serious and growing threat to our health.

 

In the meantime, I think it’s wise to increase our vigilance in dealing with potential bacterial infections. Cuts and scrapes should be cleaned and treated promptly and thoroughly, and they should be tended until they are completely healed. I don’t feel that I can be the least bit sanguine any more about even the most innocuous-seeming cut or scrape. In retrospect, I think we should have had a health care provider debride the scraped-up area right after it happened. Keep a close eye on wounds, but always let your health care provider be the one to decide whether you need antibiotics or not; don’t insist on them. Overuse is a major, major part of the problem we are now faced with. And unfortunately, we’re currently in the position of having to be more judicious with their use, even as the potency of bacteria increases.

 

 

Above: Recently, Richard and I visited the ghost mining town of Bodie, near Mono Lake, with my sister and her husband. Many of the abandoned buildings were covered with sheets of metal that had beautiful oxidation patterns, such as the siding pictured above. Over the weekend, my brother-in-law generously played around with some of my photos to increase my familiarity with Photoshop, and this photo is one that benefitted from his expertise and artist’s eye.