Should You Take Probiotics After a Course of Antibiotics?

We were talking earlier about probiotics. Is there a benefit of probiotics once you've taken antibiotics to reflourish your gut flora? You know that's where the studies really at this point have demonstrated that it's very temporary. In other words if you're taking probiotics you can get a boost initially but it doesn't sustain itself over time and then the natural flora comes back. I mean the gut microbes will come back as they've been reduced. What I'm saying is is it beneficial to people if they do take a probiotic after antibiotics because antibiotics do have a devastating effect on your flora. Yeah. Kills the bad stuff but it also kills a lot of the good stuff right? Yeah. So is it beneficial for people once they have taken an antibiotic to take probiotics to sort of reflourish at least temporary? Yeah and that's what I'm saying is that it doesn't, the data don't support that it stays. In other words you get a short-term boost and it gives you some other new good bacteria but they don't stay around. But what if you just keep taking it? Even then they just don't stay around. Your normal gut flora will come back and take over so the probiotics in of themselves are not giving you that long-term boost. So you don't think there's any benefit to having even a short-term boost? Well you know it's again, surely I'm not going to profess to be the expert on probiotics but I'll tell you that the data we have doesn't show that they have a big boost and that they actually help you long term or short term meaning that it makes any difference. Now there's one exception to that where I would say and this is a very different thing than probiotics but we actually have a disease called Clostridium difficile which is a bad bacteria that happens when you've taken away too many antibiotics and it colonizes your gut because you don't have competing organisms there and then you can die from this. There are treatments for that called actually fecal transplants. Yeah I've heard of that. And that's where actually there you take it little capsules but it's actually... You drink it in poop. Well purified, purified bugs from the poop. You're right. But you take that and that's that's that kind of is what you're talking about. That does have real benefit and there is clear evidence that if you take those, those fecal transplants as opposed to just probiotics as such, that that can have a major positive impact and your recovery from things like Clostridium difficile infection. And so more and more institutions now actually are doing fecal transplants which you never thought that that would be one thing you do one day but for those who have had this problem they're they're life-saving. Maybe we should change the name. Although on the other hand you don't forget it if you don't forget it. Yeah you don't forget if it's a fecal transplant but that's what's gonna be nerve-wracking to people. Yeah yeah you know once you're that sick boy it feels good to take it. It does you know. Have you done it? I've never done it. I've never had a problem where I've had to but but for the I've know people who have been desperately sick who have taken them and have really done much better. Much much better.