Simon Mills: Most Replayed Moment: The Antibiotic Alternative Big Pharma Doesn't Want You To Know!

The excerpt opens with the guest listing what they have been "able to ascertain" as the risks of "misuse or overuse or inappropriate use of antibiotics". The first is damage to the gut microbiome. The second is contributing to antibiotic resistance, which they call "the main thing". The third is more tentative. Introduced with "I guess", it is the idea that resistance can leave people slower to heal from illnesses. The guest says this loss of healing capacity is something seen "particularly those who are long-term ill", and that much of their work aims "to put some of that right."

The host asks about links to colorectal cancers and the guest agrees. Their reasoning runs through the microbiome: they describe it as "a major factor in how well the gut is" and say lower-gut cancers belong in that picture. They put Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and bowel cancer together as "very closely linked to the state of the microbiome." The excerpt gives no studies or figures behind these associations.

The host asks whether plants offer alternatives so they don't have to jump "straight to antibiotics for everything". The guest's answer starts with a caveat:

If you've got a serious gut or other infection, you may need the antibiotics, so let's put that straight away.

The guest then contrasts this with viral illness. For a cold, flu or other viral problem, "particularly the airways", they say antibiotics are of no use and only add to the risk of resistance. They describe resistance as natural selection. Each course of antibiotics, in their account, grows a small resistant population of whichever bacterial species is affected.

To illustrate, the guest offers a thought experiment, not data. Picture 1,000 bacteria, "a small amount by their terms". Kill 999 of them, and the one survivor becomes two in 20 minutes and four in 40 minutes, until it is "a new population" that is already resistant. Their conclusion:

So we're creating resistance every time we use an antibiotic.