Ways to Treat Infections Without using Antibiotics ... What is yours?

Ralph, thanks for mentioning Usnea, seems like I have heard of it though wasn't sure what it was so I looked it up.

It said that it is a lichen, part algae, part fungi.  Good to know what a lichen is. It is found on conifers, oaks and fruit trees.

It is also known as "Old Man's Beard".  I don't think I have anything like that growing here.  Though it is good to know.

Calamus root woks well for about any kind of infectious disease, flu, etc

Years ago I got a root canal by an over-zealous dentist...it was an awful experience for me, especially when I looked back on it and thought it was unnecessary.

The tooth that was worked on and capped once again got infected, and I had a visible abscess that scared the living #$*! out of me. BUT...I didn't want to go back to the dentist, so I started researching...

After much perusing, I cut out sugar and most refined foods and added grass-fed cow's butter, cod liver oil, and lots of fermented foods to my daily diet. Abscess completely went away, and I haven't had a cavity since. Also, for toothpaste I use activated charcoal, coconut oil, and bentonite clay with a little peppermint oil every other day and baking soda the rest of the time. I floss and use hydrogen peroxide to rinse. I haven't been to the dentist in 5 years, and my next visit is coming up--I'm willing to bet I don't have any cavities still :)

Thought I would snap a picture of the Usnea growing in my young olive tree for reference.

Awesome thread. I will have to copy it all out and note the different options for the different types of ailments.

I'd like to take a different angle on this. A lot of the suggestions - which all look highly interesting and useful - are about using bactericides. In our gardens and farms, we often prefer to increase diversity, encourage predators, improve soil life, etc. before reaching for the (natural) pesticide or fungicide. So  what about the equivalent for our bodies ?

Some people have already talked about why we get ill, and about using things like yoghurt. I've started lacto-fermenting vegetables and am trying to improve my gut microbiome, (and incidentally, in parrallel, the soil life in my garden).  Also, experimenting with no-poo, I'm interested in skin and scalp pH and our natural skin biome - and started wondering about using lacto-ferments on the skin. I'm thinking about diversity, using friendly microbes to combat ones that have got out of hand and created an imbalance.

I've always had very sensitive skin between the legs, and used to be vulnerable to vaginal infections. Then I remembered I used to use yoghurt to treat those. More recently, I went through a spate of repeatedly getting cystitis, over about 3 years, perhaps longer. I try to avoid antibiotics and tried other solutions, but given the scary things I was told about what untreated cystitis could do to you, I regularly accepted treatments with a 3-day, supposedly "specific" antibiotic. Then one day it wouldn't go away and I was told I had a resistant strain of E. Coli. I was cross, why me ??? I've always eaten healthy food, vegetarian, organic, etc, and avoided antibiotics, it's not faiiiiiirrrr ! (Anger at the bad guys lol) Was given 2 ultra-strong rambo killer antibiotics. I was still too unsure of myself to refuse so took them. But the doctor told me "if that doesn't work, you will have to go to hospital to get a more powerful antibiotic, I'm not allowed to prescribe anything stronger than that". Well that scared me a lot more than what untreated cystitis can do to your kidneys, so when it returned I just stopped treating it altogether. I just drank lots of water and improved my diet (less sugar) and I regularly drink bearberry leaf tea to safeguard kidneys. The cystitis has improved. But I now sometimes get sore, inflamed skin around my anus, which is no doubt related to this E. Coli strain (and perhaps not yet having the right balance in the no-poo tightrope walk). All this provoked me to think "well why wouldn't water kefir or yogurt or water from my lacto-fermented vegetables help?" and it does. (Hopefully when gut microbiota has evolved enough, the problem will go away altogether).

I was actually looking for a thread on using fermented products on skin, and an internet search showed me that it has become fashionable, is is all the rage in "beauty" products. So does anyone use home-made fermented products for skin care or infections ?


Another way of using microbes to combat microbes : I saw a really interesting documentary about bacteriophage viruses : https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/078693-000-A/l-incroyable-histoire-des-tueurs-de-bacteries/

Here's some info in English : https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48199915

I learnt that phage viruses are estimated to kill off 1/2 the bacteria on earth every single day, that they are present everywhere, and that in Poland, because the soviet block did not have access to modern antibiotics produced by the west during the soviet era, phage therapy was pursued throughout that time and is a recognised form of medecine over there. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01056/full) Here, we do not accept their empirically derived phage medecine and we are isolating and testing our own strains, and already using them on desperate cases, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. There seems to be an awful lot of work going on concering phages, so it looks like an interesting area to keep track of.

But for the moment, I'm mostly interested in fermented products. Anyone else use those ? How ?

We do a lot of ferments, got a crock full of sauerkraut right now.We ferment some kraut with collards too, we always grow too many.
Wife ferments carrots during winter months and cucumbers in summer as well.  Probiotic rich foods are supposed to be good for your health, we just love the taste and is another way of preserving harvest.

I put up a post here many years ago, and my ideals were to never need or use doctor remedies. which I still stick with except for a 3 or 4 month period recovering from a rabid bobcat bite.  

Within minutes, after stopping the bleeding I took a big hit of Echinacea extract and goldenseal root powder, and unknown to me at the time that is exactly what Dr. Christopher says to use for rabies, with no suggestions of dosage or length of treatment, a very unspecific almost casual aside for a book dealing with serious ailments. Was the disease just too rare and he never saw a case? Was it not considered to be serious back in his day? All good questions, but I never really consulted his big book till some time after the fact. so it didn't make much difference at the time.

I just know that The Yogaville community had recently experienced a rabies death - a long time practitioner nipped by an innocent puppy in India-who didn't think about it at the time, came back and with no real diagnosis till months later and by then it was too late. so news of the attack I had experienced spread quickly and within 24 hrs there was a small squad overcrowding my living room persuading me to get the shots.

After a lot of research looking for the cheapest place, found out an emergency room was the only place they kept the serum on hand for the initial painful injections and their version of treatment of the wound and for a visit of a few hrs-most spent in waiting for treatment, maybe an hr of hands on treatment, and mostly with trainees being supervised, 10,000$ later I was back on the road, and the follow up shots in the series I was able to get at the local county clinic and they didn't charge me anything, but the nurse there was quite accommodating, and aside from the rabies, noticed the red infection line climbing my leg, and up to this point I had taken no antibiotics.

So we get to the meat of this story as far as treating cat bite wounds (with or without rabies).
This bob cat had aggressively grabbed hold of my leg and was trying to steal a hunk of meat so the wound was deep and surface applications would never reach the deeper tissue involved. So while I had a few oral antibiotics for systemic infections, I was not doing enough, I had no experience with those types of wounds and was way too casual with amounts, varieties, and frequency of dosage. The county nurse saw me three times over the next couple weeks administering the rabies follow ups, and established that the infection was not under control and warned me of septecemia (is that a real thing?  :-)

Anyway, I went to the major clinic in the county (the nurse couldn't prescribe) and the doctor there was pulling out white strands through an existing hole near my tendon. I had noticed that stuff coming out, but hesitated to remove it.

He also prescribed a specific antibiotic apart from the general one for a bacteria common to cat bites. 6 weeks later I could start to use that leg again, but during that time I saw that Dr. every week and he pulled out more of the damaged tendon each week until the infection was more under control and that hole had closed up.  I had been keeping that hole packed with Dr. C's black ointment, a drawing salve not intended to heal over like comfrey might, but rather to pull toxins, splinters, etc out of the body.

I was treating the main wound with poultices changed a couple times a day, the bandages provided by the clinic proved useful, some of the herbs were goldenseal, marshmallow root, a  little white oak bark here and there  and a little echinacea tincture. The wound itself was oozing for a while and had a fair amount of moisture any way, so i would mix the dry powders and sprinkle them over the wound and generally speaking that worked pretty well. This was more or less the middle of winter, and I'm not the most religious about keeping supplies on hand, but some dried plantain leaf would have been nice, poke rood powder (in small amounts, topical only)  but in the depth of winter (feb 6) there's not a lot fresh to be had. There are of course other possible combinations, whatever you are most familiar with.

I have learned a lot from that  experience, and it also raised lots of questions I had never considered before. It is obvious in retrospect this infection was spreading fast and eating up my body and even if I had stumbled on the right oral and topical antibiotics I would have had to be much quicker and treated it much better than I did in order to avoid "professional" help.

What you will do in an emergency situation is really up to you, my experience is just that, my experience. Draw from it what you will. There are a lot of "ifs" here - if I had better antibiotics on hand, if I had treated it more seriously.....

But in the end I did what I have written about here and I'm still alive and kicking,  The Doctors didn't kill me, quite the opposite, I'm still paying off the emergency room bill, that couple hrs back in 2022.

I did write this up on my site pictures