On the upswing
We've talked quite a lot about antibiotic overuse and the havoc it can wreak on your personal health. But the drastic upswing in antibiotic use that has occurred over the past few decades is just as much a public health issue as it is a personal one. In fact, it's one of the primary causes of the skyrocketing rates of a thoroughly unpleasant infection called C. difficile. C. diff, as it's commonly referred to, causes severe diarrhea and blood poisoning and can be fatal. And, as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) stated recently, it "often results when antibiotic use suppresses the bacteria normally found in the colon." Take that little tidbit of information and combine it with the other fact released in the AHRQ report -- that rates of C. diff increased by 200 percent over a five-year period, from 2000 to 2005. Certainly sounds like a clear-cut case of antibiotic abuse to me. And yet, the article I read didn't address that aspect at all. Of course, in all fairness, it was really more of a straight reporting piece than a solution-driven feature. But that certainly doesn't mean there aren't solutions. The best one is the bacteria-fighting technique Dr. Wright wrote about a few months ago, in the May and June issues of Nutrition & Healing: ultraviolet light. Most people only think of it in terms of the sun, but there are numerous frequencies of UV light that have extremely powerful bacteria- and virus-destroying abilities. But unlike antibiotics, UV light doesn't leave you vulnerable to other illnesses. To read the May and June Nutrition & Healing articles about the healing potential of UV light, subscribers can log on to the Archives portion of www.wrightnewsletter.com with the username and password listed on page 8 of your most recent issue. Source:
"Rate doubles for nasty infection among hospital patients," Health Day News (www.healthday.com), 4/23/08 | 
