Quassia for amoebic dysentery, giardia and worms?
Evan Ravitz has a knoll about curing parasitical infections naturally with Quassia, which contains the "phytochemical quassin, the bitterest substance found in nature."
People traveling in 3rd world countries are often afraid of intestinal parasites, but, having lived for 3 years in poorer areas of Mexico and 2 in Guatemala, I learned there are easy solutions. I picked up amoebic dysentery several times while on long bicycle trips, and knowing how to deal with them, I was able to continue with no problems. This method is for healthy people only!How to cure amoebic dysentery, giardia and worms with QuassiaHere's how I do it: If my gut hurts, I wait two days. If it's just a bacterial infection, you should start to feel better. Coconut milk is very soothing. Definitely avoid alcohol and sweets, which bacteria and other parasites love.
If after 2 days, you feel as bad or worse, you should start treatment with a “full-spectrum antibiotic” -or the herb Quassia, which is used in much the same way -especially if there is mucus in your feces and sulphur in the gas you pass.In most of Latin America, just go to a Pharmacia and ask for Flagyl (or the generic Metronidazole), the cheap drug available everywhere or say “tengo amebas” (“I have amoebas”) and they'll almost certainly give you Flagyl. In the U.S. you need a prescription, so DON'T WAIT until you return or you'll have to pay for expensive tests to get treatment -while the amoebas are eating your lunch, dinner and breakfast and you are getting weaker.
Quassia won't make you feel as bad as Flagyl, but neither is fun. Both are killing everything in your gut, so you need to replenish the beneficial bacteria with probiotics, like yoghurt, kefir, sauerkraut, miso, etc., after the treatment.
Often people with amoebas will wait longer until they're really sick and go to a doctor for a stool test. If they don't find the amoebas with a microscope the first time, and you wait longer, it will take weeks or more to recover your strength after you take the treatment. That's why I assume I have them if I don't feel better in 2 days. Neither treatment is pleasant, but you'll function fine, which is nearly impossible with amoebas.
Quassia is available at herb and health food shops. It will be either shredded or chopped. Take a large handful on your trip, which should cost a few bucks.
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interesting
http://www.herbs2000.com/herbs/herbs_quassia.htm
I googled "quassia dysentery" and the first 10 pages of results were nothing but the typical unreliable "alternative medicine" sites.
The final sentence in the article is the most important one: "I am not a doctor and do not know your condition! Please discuss this treatment with your doctor before you go!"
"Both are killing everything in your gut"
That's the bad news right there. Too much Flagyl turned my father lactose intolerant (or into a lactard, as he puts it). Be careful with this stuff.
Every time a discussion of giardia or amoebas comes up I like to mention the importance of having a good lightweight water filter system, and traveling with it if you're backpacking or in a place where the water is even slightly suspect.
And these make good tools to have as a part of any basic home and car emergency kit as well.
There are many models, but I like my Mountain Safety Research Mini-EX, which screws onto the top of a standard water bottle.
http://www.msrgear.com/watertreatment/miniworks.asp
You can get these at a variety of places, so I'm not suggesting one place over another, but everyone should have one of these.
Ounce. Prevention. Cure, Etc...
@3 This suggests an effective treatment for (at least some peoples') lactose intolerance. Interesting.
We need more solutions in the form of "the cheap drug available everywhere".
Yeah, I take all my medical advice from random guys on bikes.
My stepson, who begins his residency in a few weeks, recently heard this from someone who travels frequently to Belize. It made him laugh.
Because we don't already have enough trouble with Clostridium difficile. Metronidazole is one of the few things left that can take it out. Handing it out over the counter will rapidly cut that route off.
gabrielm: I was on some serious antibiotics for food poisoning (raw fish isn't always a great idea, who knew!) and the doctor advised me to avoid all dairy otherwise your immune system identifies it as bad with the help of the meds... That may be a simplification, but I can still snarf down bricks of cheese with no worries.
Quassia and this advice sound interesting, the procedure for personal healthcare while traveling in the hinterlands is much different from being at home. The goal is to keep moving, keep on schedule, and get home upright.
It is a *BAD IDEA* to take medical advice from a blog post!
I don't think BB should be passing on medical advice, especially from someone who presents their opinions an anecdotal as fact, without any sort of fact-checking or disclaimer or warning. This is borderline irresponsible.
Be careful about using this flagyl! It's metronidazole. Some people are allergic. There's a reason it's only available by prescription here. If used wrong, it can *hurt you*.
Smells like woo to me. No double blinded, peer review studies means 'ignore'.
Hmm, these two pages
http://www.herbs2000.com/herbs/herbs_quassia.htm
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/q/quassi01.html
rip off this one
http://www.kalyx.com/store/proddetail.cfm/ItemID/669514.0/CategoryID/1000.0/SubCatID/3365.0/file.htm
which at least cites its sources; I would be hesitant to try a recipe of quassia concoctions seem from 1898!
Secondly, the idea that some scientific knowledge (which includes medicine) is "too dangerous" for everyone to have access to, because they might use it inappropriately, is absurd. I recognize that there's been some legitimate debate about this, from the Bill Joy crowd (IIRC), but I've been under the impression that since the value of disparate scientists around the world collaborating online to identify and cure diseases has already been a proven, it's been accepted that crowdsourcing solutions to new outbreaks of disease is more valuable than the risk of bioterrorism or some such.
Posting it online (for everyone to access) is a form of submission to peer-review.
You're saying that drugs have side-effects and assume the risk of using them responsibly?!Thankfully people don't have to worry about the deadly consequences of misusing technology with anything else, like driving a car or firing a gun.
I've cured six people of lactose intolerance, but unfortunately I have just failed to cure one. It turned out she was actually allergic (as opposed to *believing* she was allergic, like most lactose intolerant people do).
So I'm modifying the recipe. First, apply whole milk to your skin for several days in the same place. If you get a skin reaction, you are really allergic, so stop now.
If not, eat yoghurt with live cultures every day for two months. It will be unpleasant at first, but then you will be cured and able to enjoy such delicacies as baked brie and milkshakes!
Humans cannot digest milk without the aid of intestinal bacteria. It's just a matter of having the RIGHT intestinal bacteria.
Zuzu, interesting argument - I've never heard anyone argue for legalization of antibiotics before from a libertarian perspective. I think that's the one class of drugs where there's a good libertarian argument for barriers to access, since there's such a huge negative externality from improper use that individuals who misuse them can't possibly be made to internalize. (Like with vaccination.) All the studies say that decreasing antibiotic use through restriction also decreases antibiotic resistance in the general population.
Still, it seems unnecessary that intelligent people can't buy antibiotics OTC for, say, amoebas or a UTI.
Harsh, if you check my original knoll, which Mark excerpted, I begin and end it with a disclaimer.
Of course Flagyl and possibly Quassia can hurt you! But they will kill amoebas before they kill you or destroy your health permanently.
Evan Ravitz
If you eat enough yogurt BEFORE you go there is a good chance you will not have any such problem. And you don't need a prescription for yogurt.
Sister Y, what worries me quite a bit in the back of my mind are the occasional studies on what happens to all of the drugs we use that are sent as waste into the water treatment plants.
Any oral drug has a very low metabolism rate; most of it gets filtered by the kidneys and sent out with your pee.
Then again, I'd also like to understand the zoning and permits behind the gross negligence of curb service waste management companies. They'll take anything, including obviously inappropriate materials, such as old CRT monitors or used motor oil.
Are you referring to refusal of immunizations? As long as most people aren't acting stupidly, we can rely on herd immunity.As for people abusing antibiotics (which for a long time included doctors)... we could work to reverse the cultural trend of medical ignorance and instead encourage medical knowledge in the general population. That means going up against the AMA and the particularly aggressive cult of professionalism and privilege in medical practice. (e.g. the "God complex" of doctors)
it seems unnecessary that intelligent people can't buy antibiotics OTC for, say, amoebas or a UTI.
You have a microbiology lab at home? How do you know you have amoebas or a UTI? Many illnesses could have the same symptoms. You might also not know that one antibiotic will increase the strength of your oral diabetic med threefold, sending you rapidly into a coma. Self-medicating is dangerous. Of course, libertarians won't expect any medical care unless they've posted an enormous bond to pay for it or have a really high limit on the Amex card. I mean, they wouldn't want to buy into the system, would they?
Howdy. I just started an emergency medicine residency a couple months ago. I'm just an intern.
Encouraging people to take a very powerful (but limited in spectrum) antibiotic based on a stomach ache that lasts more than two days is a pretty bad idea for two reasons.
First, there are common things that metro isn't adequate for. Secondly, it's the first and last line against C. I saw metro-intermediate strains of C. diff fairly commonly in my third year of med school. They're the vast minority, but they're scary when you see them. C. diff is extremely contagious, and you should not be biking though towns if you've got it.
While you might be able to treat the C. diff you have, you could have also managed to spread an intermediate strain through three other villages when you were traveling. Think about an E. coli outbreak- they people who die usually aren't the first who got it.
Doctors are concerned about public health in addition to individual health. Yes, you would be able to adequately treat yourself 90% of the time- metro treats a lot of stuff. Non-judicious antibiotic use gets you labeled an idiot pretty quickly in medicine. While you might be treating the patient who's in your office, you're making a bigger problem in the long run.
Also...
There's no reason doctors don't want you to treat yourself if you can. If it were really true that we really wanted everyone to get sick all the time so we always had a ton of business, they we'd all be sociopaths.
Medicine disagrees with poor use of antibiotics not because you might heal yourself. It's because MRSA is the new standard and VRSA is now fairly common because people just guessed about what antibiotic to use.
Interesting discussion.
Here in Chile, Quassia is used in shampoos for the treatment of lice. Never heard it was good for other stuff.
You have a microbiology lab at home?
I admit nothing! But I've seen at least one study that said that, for recurrent UTIs under certain conditions, there was no medical benefit to doing a culture to determine the strain, and that the recommended thing for doctors to do was just to instantly prescribe antibiotics.
Zuzu - I have a better analogy - the effectiveness of antibiotics on a population is a shared resource that cannot effectively be divided for private ownership. You know, like a . . . commons. And antibiotic resistance from overuse of antibiotics (yes, doctors are a big contributor) is a tragedy of the commons!
Self-medicating is dangerous.
Also, before I left for (a very modern, urban part of) India, my doctor gave me a bottle of Cipro and ordered me to self-medicate under certain conditions if I got sick. Why do I need her magic prescription to do that?
(Yes, I realize I am arguing both sides of the same question at the same time, though both are sincere.)
It appears that the original poster and I may be the only amoebic dysentery sufferers who've posted. The infection is no joke. It can kill you (or, more likely, cause a bunch of random and bad symptoms). It does not present consistent symptom sets, which makes self-diagnosis complicated.
Flagyl has a plenty of side effects (including, in my case, bad nausea, a horrible metallic taste, and at 3x250 mg a day, extreme delirium and weakness). I suspect that the side effects were made worse by impaired liver function as a result of amoebic cysts in my liver.
If Quassia helps, terrific. If is doesn't, and you've taken a 10-day course while you've got a developing amoeba infestation, you've lost ten days. Seems like a bad risk to me.
If it's pooping in a specimen cup and sending it to Quest Diagnostics, I'm already doing that if/when my doctor "orders" it. (That's ostensibly like dropping off 35mm film for development. Though I'm all for people creating their own darkroom / microbiology lab too.)
Basic diagnostic medicine is something people can figure out with online research if there were something like Medipedia (or what WebMD wishes it could do). In the same way people choose, or not to, to prepare their own income tax forms, do their own plumbing, write their own software, or change their own brake pads on their cars.
This is conflating the issue.First of all, in the USA antibiotics have never been OTC to my knowledge, yet here we are with resistant bacteria strains. It was doctors who fucked up already.
Money, and the privileged status to make more money, is a solid motivator. (Specifically, rent seeking behavior, rather than legitimate profit seeking.) The AMA guidelines are sociopathic about defending their turf from all comers. (There's a name for this phenomenon, often cited in management, that escapes me at the moment.) Just ask any parallel practitioner, such as nursing, how doctors seek what amounts to bureaucratic class privilege rather than relying solely on expert knowledge. (Not that nursing isn't often just as bad about promulgation of "professionalism" -- the entire medical field is laden with such culture of exclusion.) Or, consider the replacement of midwives with obstetrics, which for quite awhile historically increased the infant mortality rate.To quote Ted Nelson:
Interesting read but the following had me wondering:
'Definitely avoid alcohol and sweets, which bacteria and other parasites love.'
I'm not sure, but doesn't alcohol kill bacteria? I worked at a hospital transporting patients and we had to spray our hands with alcohol on a regular basis.
If you take Flagyl, keep in mind that it was once used for treating alcoholism. If you drink alcohol while taking it, it will make you violently ill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagyl#Interaction_with_alcohol
Watch out with the quassia - there are a whole host of chemicals nicknamed "quassinoids" which have been isolated from the different species of these plants, and have been shown to have all sorts of wonderful properties, such as being insecticidal, antimicrobial and so on. The review paper I read on the subject (Guo et al. 2005, Current Medical Chemistry, 12:173-190) basically summed up the problem that quassinoids are also anti-humanoid - they are wickedly toxic to a whole range of fauna.
Zuzu, I'm sorry, but you're just wrong about this. Your argument that "in the USA antibiotics have never been OTC to my knowledge, yet here we are with resistant bacteria strains. It was doctors who fucked up already" tends to ignore that 1) to the extent that doctors "fucked up", it was in prescribing antibiotics to people who demanded them regardless of actual need, and 2) antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, just like any other bug, cross borders very quickly. OTC antibiotics are part of the problem. Preventing the bugs from entering your GI tract in the first place is a far superior solution than throwing pills at every tummy ache and waiting for the bugs to adapt. Your beef with the AMA is irrelevant.
Driving a car or firing a gun is a bad analogy, because there's an obvious difference between responsible and irresponsible use.
Even if I take the correct amount of the correct medicine, if I'm allergic to it, I'm either sicker or dead.
Prescribing medicine to myself is more like doing repair work on my own car or gun. If I don't understand the inner workings of the technology, I'm in trouble.
@Halloween Jack, my point was that even the experts screwed up out of ignorance, so I find the assertion -- that only "experts" should be allowed by law to make the decision -- rather weak.
Hence, the relevance of my beef with the AMA. It's another form of security theater.
I don't think anyone was suggesting otherwise.What you seem to imply is that people, other than professional doctors, are incapable of adhering to this.
I had amoebic dysentery one summer many years ago for almost two months in post-war ravaged Lebanon.
I don't think this herb is good enough to cure amoebic dysentery.
I almost died because I was given Flagyl at first, which is a generic broad-spectrum anti-biotic often given in the 3rd world when they don't have lab facilities to test what exact microbe you have.
The herb is a limited spectrum cure. If a broad-spectrum anti-biotic didn't work for me-- why would a limited spectrum herb work?
Not until the Isreali bombing and invasion had subsided, and not until I was finally able to be hospitalized and have cultures done-- and not until I was given French antibiotics for the exact microbes I had-- did I finally recover.
I was also given a six week treatment of a French medicine of live fungi to replace the fungi that naturally lines your intestinal walls-- which the microbes had destroyed. This medicine, I forgot the name, I just remember it was not approved by the FDA at the time. However, it was really good. I also was required to eat live active culture yogurt every day for that first year, as well as, was recommended to eat such yogurt for the rest of my life.
Then it took me a year to recover from the fact that I had lost most of my body weight, etc. I could no longer walk or stay conscious by the time I was finally able to be hospitalized-- a delay due to the constant bombing and destruction of the infrastructure by the southern 'neighbor'.
It was very traumatic.
People should be wary of herbal cures at times. Pure cranberry juice on the other hand, always helps me when I feel like I am getting a UTI.
Just be careful, people!
#17 Evanest - Thanks for replying here, and I appreciate that you have that disclaimer.
@Zuzu - Information from a licensed medical professional is far, far more likely to be accurate than information from a blog post. The situation presented when some who read this info on the net, who didn't think about the advice critically, walking into a random drug store, in a foreign country, when they don't speak the language, asking for unspecified drugs, based on their own informal diagnosis, is just so ripe for disaster that it raised giant red flags for me. To my reading, the excerpt presented at BB and the (lack of) framing from the Boinger posting it didn't prompt the necessary critical thinking about the medical advice contained therein.
That was my only concern when I posted. I don't think I agree with your doubts about the professional medical establishment, or your confidence in the wisdom of crowds on medical issues, but I'm not equipped to rebut them. Except I will say that a great many people will swear homeopathic substances are effective beyond the placebo effect and a great many stores sell those products alongside actual OTC medicine, and I wonder how that fits in with your views.