Won’t antibiotics do less harm to our beneficial gut bacteria if it is injected directly into the body rather than go through our digestive tract?
In: 100
From experiment on myself, if you take anti-biotics orally, each time you take it, take a probiotic about 2 hours later.
That gives the antibiotic time to move on from where it’s killing everything, which will let the probtiotic replace the “population” and avoid a fungal microbe explosion, which is what causes the bloating and other issues from antibiotics.
Doctor here. A lot of antibiotics we give are an injection and through an IV. They are systemic and still affect your digestive tract and there is still risk for diarrhea and even overgrowth of bad bacteria like clostridium difficile.
Disclaimer: not an expert.
Injection tends to be easier on the body overall, because – among other reasons – direct delivery into the bloodstream means a lower dose is sufficient to reach the target concentration of the drug than you’d need with a less efficient delivery method like oral.
But oral has two big advantages. The first one is convenience. It’s just easier to take a pill twice a day than get an injection twice a day (especially if side effects make getting around difficult or if you’re infectious and shouldn’t meet people). The second is retardardation: it’s somewhat easy to basically “program” a pill to give off its drug at a predetermined point/section of your digestive tract (or even have several stages) at a certain rate. Injection, as far as I’m aware, means you get the whole dose of the drug at once, which means drug concentration in your body peaks and then continually goes down, where a pill can give off the drug slowly over a long time, keeping the concentration somewhat stable.
I had to give my mom IV antibiotics for a week or so when I was 22. I will never forget it. Way so much trouble. She needed the line insert all the time. Then I had to hook up a tube once or twice a day with the drip. And I had to make sure there were no bubbles in the tube. It was so scary. She was a good patient. But what about a kid who will run around? Oh no.
Besides all the reasons given above, neither the healthcare system nor the Feds want you to be able to have needles at home. Diabetes and a few other conditions really do require them, but drug addicts need needles all the time and the last thing the anti-drug establishment wants is for everybody to have a few dozen leftover needles lying around their homes.
Not a doctor but I assume the antibiotics people take target certian receptors on the bacteria they are trying to kill. Those receptors probably aren’t present in gut bacteria, basically making the meds oblivious to our good bacteria
Everybody wants to inject when possible, but a lot of the time, you just gotta settle for oral.
But in seriousness, so that people can do regiments at home easily. Many people hate needles, many would have trouble injecting, mess it up. Pills are just easy.
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