How my family Stopped a Chronic MRSA Infection When Conventional Medicine Failed

[Lorea]

Very interesting the way they followed until they found what suited them
Thanks to share !

 

[kapepua]

A lot of times, conventional medicine just does not have the answer and a person will need faith to venture into the alternative.

 

[aimarok]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

 

[Konstantin]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

That is because you have left it too much time to ferment. The fermentation process will go until there is sugar left in the tea. The time depends on from quantity and from the sugar that you added to the tea.

 

[Ant22]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

That is because you have left it too much time to ferment. The fermentation process will go until there is sugar left in the tea. The time depends on from quantity and from the sugar that you added to the tea.

I've been thinking of doing my own Kombucha since I bought it in an organic supermarket and enjoyed the taste. The flavour was a little sweet actually.

Konstantin, what kind of sugar would you suggest adding to the tea and how much (per litre for example)?

Does what you said above mean that if I don't leave my kombucha for very long I'll have some sugar left in it and less fermentation? Or would it be a good idea to add less sugar and leave it for longer to have less sugar but more good bacteria growth? I'm asking this as I'm trying to eliminate as much sugar from my diet as possible.

 

[aimarok]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

That is because you have left it too much time to ferment. The fermentation process will go until there is sugar left in the tea. The time depends on from quantity and from the sugar that you added to the tea.

Exactly. I didn't like the sweetness in it and kept it fermenting until there's no left. Probably it wasn't a good idea since very low pH could decimate all the good bacteria. At some point I caught an infection with kombucha, had to lay down for a day with a fever and stopped my little gardening experiment. My probiotic of choice is sauerkraut now.

 

[Konstantin]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

That is because you have left it too much time to ferment. The fermentation process will go until there is sugar left in the tea. The time depends on from quantity and from the sugar that you added to the tea.

I've been thinking of doing my own Kombucha since I bought it in an organic supermarket and enjoyed the taste. The flavour was a little sweet actually.

Konstantin, what kind of sugar would you suggest adding to the tea and how much (per liter for example)?

Does what you said above mean that if I don't leave my kombucha for very long I'll have some sugar left in it and less fermentation? Or would it be a good idea to add less sugar and leave it for longer to have less sugar but more good bacteria growth? I'm asking this as I'm trying to eliminate as much sugar from my diet as possible.

I`m making Kombucha at home for almost 15 years. This is how I make it.

You can use simple white table sugar. If you mix it with some kind of dark sugar, it is ok, the taste will be little different.

You need the starting culture. Pure water, possibly without any chlorine in it because chlorine will destroy all bacterias and yeasts.
On 1 Liter of water, you need about 50-60 grams of sugar ( about 4 tablespoons ) and 10 grams ( or 2 Teaspoons ) of green tea or black tea.

You will make tea from those ingredients, let it cool down to room temperature. Put the tea in some container( avoid plastic as much as you can ) and put the starter kombucha culture in that tea. It can float on the surface or it can sink. Its all ok. Usually, it will float just under the surface.

Feel the container for max 3/4 and put the Kombucha culture inside. Cover it with light cloth so it can bread.

For a quantity of 1 Litter live it for 3-4 days at room temperature. Put it in a place and make sure it will not be exposed to direct sunlight.

After 3-4 days try the tea. It should have slightly sweet and sour taste. If you like a more sour taste, which means less sugar in the tea leaves it few more days.( more sour taste means less sugar is left inside unfermented)
You must experiment and find the best time for you.

The time of fermentation depends on the environment temperature. If the temperature is too low or too high it affects the fermentation process.

When you are satisfied with the final product, remove the kombucha culture( which is now even bigger), wash it with clean cold water. Pour the tea into the bottle and close the bottle. Then leave the bottle closed few more days in the refrigerator so it can ferment again ( anaerobic fermentation) then it is best for consumption.

Empty the container where kombucha was fermenting, wash it with clear water( don't use any detergents ), fill 1/10 of the container with the previously made Kombucha tea, and the rest will be your freshly make tea as described above. At last put again the Kombucha culture and cover it with light cloth.

So you repeat the cycle every time you want to make a new batch.

So, in freshly made tea there are maximum 50-60 grams of sugar in one liter of tea. When fermented it will be much less. In one big glass( 250 ml) after fermentation, you will probably have less then 10 grams per glass. If you put 3 tablespoons per litter at the beginning it will have maybe a double less than that at the end. Try and error is the best way to find what is best for you.

Sometimes if it is more soar ( wich i like it ) , if i drink one glass of it my entire face and neck will become red and hot. It is probably the niacin ( Vit B3) flush .
_http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/niacin-flush-benefits-for-detoxification/

A common story I am told when someone first tries homemade kombucha is that they sometimes experience flushed cheeks and get a bit tingly or lightheaded. This temporary sensation, called a niacin flush, usually lasts less than ten minutes. It is triggered by the extremely bioavailable and rapidly absorbed niacin (Vitamin B3) into the bloodstream.

Here is some links where you can read little more about it
_https://www.kombuchakamp.com/sugar-and-kombucha-faq-top-10
_http://www.sarahwilson.com/2014/02/how-to-make-almost-sugar-free-fermented-kombucha/



I made 2 times per month about 15 liters per batch. FOr that quantity i need 2 weeks to fermet properly.

 

[Ant22]

Sometimes if it is more soar ( wich i like it ) , if i drink one glass of it my entire face and neck will become red and hot. It is probably the niacin ( Vit B3) flush .
_http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/niacin-flush-benefits-for-detoxification/

A common story I am told when someone first tries homemade kombucha is that they sometimes experience flushed cheeks and get a bit tingly or lightheaded. This temporary sensation, called a niacin flush, usually lasts less than ten minutes. It is triggered by the extremely bioavailable and rapidly absorbed niacin (Vitamin B3) into the bloodstream.

Here is some links where you can read little more about it
_https://www.kombuchakamp.com/sugar-and-kombucha-faq-top-10
_http://www.sarahwilson.com/2014/02/how-to-make-almost-sugar-free-fermented-kombucha/

Oh, so that's what it is? I was wondering why I was feeling a little drunk after I had Kombucha with my lunch at work. Thanks for the detailed recipe and the niacin flush explanation Konstantin. I'll experiment with the sweet/sour flavor ratios a bit.

 

[Konstantin]

Sometimes if it is more soar ( wich i like it ) , if i drink one glass of it my entire face and neck will become red and hot. It is probably the niacin ( Vit B3) flush .
_http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/niacin-flush-benefits-for-detoxification/

A common story I am told when someone first tries homemade kombucha is that they sometimes experience flushed cheeks and get a bit tingly or lightheaded. This temporary sensation, called a niacin flush, usually lasts less than ten minutes. It is triggered by the extremely bioavailable and rapidly absorbed niacin (Vitamin B3) into the bloodstream.

Here is some links where you can read little more about it
_https://www.kombuchakamp.com/sugar-and-kombucha-faq-top-10
_http://www.sarahwilson.com/2014/02/how-to-make-almost-sugar-free-fermented-kombucha/

Oh, so that's what it is? I was wondering why I was feeling a little drunk after I had Kombucha with my lunch at work. Thanks for the detailed recipe and the niacin flush explanation Konstantin. I'll experiment with the sweet/sour flavor ratios a bit.

Well, it also contains a small amount of alcohol as it is produced in the process of fermentation, but I think it's very low and that it is not enough to make you drunk. Maybe it is possible if you drink enormous quantities of it, like e few liters, i dont know.

I think that the average percentage of homemade kombucha is around 0.5 %. It also depends on sugar quantities and fermentation time.

 

[dugdeep]

When I experimented with kombucha the final product had very low pH, like a vinegar maybe. I wouldn't even try to make an enema with it.

That is because you have left it too much time to ferment. The fermentation process will go until there is sugar left in the tea. The time depends on from quantity and from the sugar that you added to the tea.

Exactly. I didn't like the sweetness in it and kept it fermenting until there's no left. Probably it wasn't a good idea since very low pH could decimate all the good bacteria. At some point I caught an infection with kombucha, had to lay down for a day with a fever and stopped my little gardening experiment. My probiotic of choice is sauerkraut now.

When I was making kombucha regularly a couple of years back I would ferment it until all the sugar was gone and then I would dilute it with some water and add stevia for taste. It wasn't too acidic since it was diluted and sweetened but you're still getting the benefits.

 

[Ant22]

Sometimes if it is more soar ( wich i like it ) , if i drink one glass of it my entire face and neck will become red and hot. It is probably the niacin ( Vit B3) flush .
_http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/niacin-flush-benefits-for-detoxification/

A common story I am told when someone first tries homemade kombucha is that they sometimes experience flushed cheeks and get a bit tingly or lightheaded. This temporary sensation, called a niacin flush, usually lasts less than ten minutes. It is triggered by the extremely bioavailable and rapidly absorbed niacin (Vitamin B3) into the bloodstream.

Here is some links where you can read little more about it
_https://www.kombuchakamp.com/sugar-and-kombucha-faq-top-10
_http://www.sarahwilson.com/2014/02/how-to-make-almost-sugar-free-fermented-kombucha/

Oh, so that's what it is? I was wondering why I was feeling a little drunk after I had Kombucha with my lunch at work. Thanks for the detailed recipe and the niacin flush explanation Konstantin. I'll experiment with the sweet/sour flavor ratios a bit.

Well, it also contains a small amount of alcohol as it is produced in the process of fermentation, but I think it's very low and that it is not enough to make you drunk. Maybe it is possible if you drink enormous quantities of it, like e few liters, i dont know.

I think that the average percentage of homemade kombucha is around 0.5 %. It also depends on sugar quantities and fermentation time.

Oh gosh, sorry for not being clear enough! I definitely don't think I was drunk, it just made me a bit dizzy so it felt like it. I don't drink alcohol more than once or twice a year so my tolerance is low but I doubt the amount I had with my lunch would have that effect.

The niacin flush explanation makes much more sense:
http://fitlife.tv/niacin-flush-the-new-detox_original/

If you are experiencing some dizziness after drinking kombucha resembling the buzz from alcohol, it is likely a niacin flush rather than due to the fermentation.

It looks like there are other people who've had a similar reaction to mine:
http://www.paleohacks.com/kombucha/why-do-i-feel-drunk-after-a-glass-of-kombucha-11106
http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/niacin-flush-benefits-for-detoxification/ (third comment under the article)

I've been reading about using Kombucha for detox and it seems to be a great product for this. I think I'll just lower the dosage to a detox one rather than drinking the whole bottle with a meal.

 

[Ant22]

This video prompted me to look into the MRSA issue in a bit more detail and it looks like antibiotics in meat production are very likely to contribute to these infections. This is due to antibiotic resistance acquired through factory farmed meat consumption as well as spread of these infections among factory/industrial farm workers.

Yup, yet another reason to buy meat from local organic farms.

The percentage of meat that comes from factory/industrial farming is well into the 90ies, with some sources quoting 99% for the US (for example: _https://farmforward.com/ending-factory-farming/)

_https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/19/uk-farmers-to-cut-antibiotic-use-to-combat-drug-resistance

Livestock Associated MRSA has also been found to be present in UK hospitals. The bug generally causes skin infections in humans, which are not life-threatening, but in some cases – especially among older patients or those with lowered immune systems - it can be fatal.

MRSA is best known in the UK for causing hospital-acquired infections – and many deaths. There has been little human to human transmission of the superbug in the community, but it is particularly dangerous in hospitals because it can colonise wounds easily, especially where patients’ immunity is low.

It has been associated with poor hygiene in hospitals, but the main factor behind the spread of MRSA has been the over-prescription of antibiotics, which has allowed a rather mundane germ that lives on many of our bodies without causing any problems to become far more dangerous to human health. CC398, a new variant of MRSA, emerged in animals and is found in intensively farmed animals (primarily pigs, but also cows and chickens), from where it can be transmitted to humans.

While government attempts to limit MRSA infections in hospitals have met with some success, there has been little comparable effort in combating MRSA infections among livestock.

A lot of sources (for example: _https://www.meatinstitute.org/index.php?ht=a/GetDocumentAction/i/99943) claim that animals are given different antibiotics to humans, hence resistance in humans shouldn’t be an issue but it looks like it is:

_http://consumersunion.org/news/the-overuse-of-antibiotics-in-food-animals-threatens-public-health-2/

Bacteria in many environments can readily exchange genes coding for antibiotic resistance with neighboring bacteria. Antibiotic resistance genes are often located on mobile genetic elements, especially plasmids, transposons and integrons which can easily move between bacteria of the same or different species, which facilitates the spread of resistance to multiple drugs by multiple types of bacteria.

The industry says that 40 percent of all the antibiotics used on the farm are drugs (called ionophores) not used in human medicine, so it doesn’t matter if bacteria become resistant to them. However, a study by scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Cornell University involving monensin, one of the most commonly used ionophores in cattle production in the U.S., demonstrated that use of monensin in cattle feed and the selection of monensin-resistant ruminal bacteria lead to a 32-fold increase in resistance to bacitracin, which is used in human medicine.27 This study demonstrates that one cannot claim that ionophores cannot select for cross resistance to any antibiotic used in human medicine.

_https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134130/pdf/jhyg00033-0166.pdf
Cooking does help remove antibiotic residues but how much is removed depends on the amount of time and temperatures used for cooking. And even small amounts do add up!

 

[JGeropoulas]

VERY interesting, thanks for sharing, Aiming!

Here is the text from the accompanying article, for those who don't have time to watch the video and/or prefer to read about this (there is also some information that wasn't included in the video):

http://stormcloudsgathering.com/how-to-stop-chronic-mrsa

How to fight chronic staph infections of the skin when antibiotics stop working

<snip>

There are a number of experimental therapies (Bacteriophage therapy for example) which hold promise for the treatment of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the future, but it may be years before these are widely available.

As the excerpts in the article below explain, bacteriophage therapy is very promising, but, of course, the usual suspect impeding its availability is the FDA.

In the meantime, if you or your family find yourself dealing with an infection that just won't go away, it's important to realize that conventional medicine may not be able to help you

I fought MRSA for years with traditional antibiotics (with no benefit) and every alternative method I could find (with varying, limited benefits). Ultimately what worked was high-quality colloidal silver, taken orally and applied topically while simultaneously consulting a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner who concluded I had leaky gut (which had weakened my immune system and resulted in adrenal fatigue) for which he prescribed GlutAloeMine (_https://www.xymogen.com/formulas/products/72) to heal my gut, as well as elimination of gluten, dairy, and all refined sugar (as well as most other sugars) to prevent future damage.

The Next Phage

How to heal an infection that defies antibiotics? Doctors in Eastern Europe have used lab-grown viruses to safely cure millions of wounds. So why can't we do the same here?

By Elizabeth Svoboda
Popular Science
March 31, 2009

As head of Lubbock's Southwest Regional Wound Care Center, Wolcott knew well the typical prognosis for patients with antibiotic-resistant infections like Brillon's: gangrene, amputation and, for about 100,000 Americans a year, death.

"'Chronic wound' is a code word for 'you can't heal it,' " he says. "The hallmark is, we cut it off or we cut it out. It's pretty barbaric." Wolcott was desperate for an alternative. After putting in 10-hour days at the clinic, he often sat up late at night poring over medical journals for the newest wound-care research—something, anything that might help patients with the most intractable infections.

When Brillon arrived for a follow-up appointment three weeks later, Wolcott entered the room with a dropper in one hand and a vial of liquid that looked suspiciously like pond water in the other. The liquid, it turned out, was Wolcott's "anything": a murky concoction filled with bacteria-eating viruses known as bacteriophages.

Physicians in Eastern Europe, Wolcott had explained to Brillon earlier, have been using phages safely since the 1920s to treat conditions that defy conventional antibiotics, from strep and tuberculosis to infected sores like his. Even U.S. drug companies sold them until the early 1940s, when penicillin came along and proved easier to use, generally more effective and, in the end, more lucrative than phages. The viruses might not help, he admitted, but if they didn't hurt, what was the harm in trying?

Brillon didn't need much convincing. The Food and Drug Administration was another story. Since 1963, the agency has mandated a strict approval process for all medications sold in America. Phage therapy has yet to be subjected to it, so Wolcott had to petition his state regulatory board to allow him to administer it only to people who had exhausted all other options. Then, because you can't find phages in U.S. pharmacies, he had to trek all the way to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to get it. There it's sold over the counter like eyedrops. He bought, for $2 each, three clear glass bottles, each filled with a liquid containing hundreds of types of phages.

As viruses go, phages are relatively benign. They're the most abundant naturally occurring organisms on Earth. They can be found virtually everywhere—-in soil, drinking water, sewage. In fact, each one of us naturally has billions of them in our bodies. They prey only on bacteria, never human cells, they rarely spread from person to person, and, perhaps most important, bacteria have trouble becoming immune to them. As living organisms, phages are constantly changing and adapting in tandem with their host bacteria to kill them more effectively. Phage therapy could therefore eliminate the vicious cycle in which bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, necessitating the development of new, even more powerful drugs, at which point the process begins all over again.
...
To the FDA, the serum Randy Wolcott drizzled on his patient's leg is new and unproven. But to the scientists working at the George Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology in the republic of Georgia, the medicine is as trusted as aspirin. Since 1923, when the facility was founded, scientists there have successfully treated millions of patients with phage therapy and presented more than 100 research abstracts at international conferences attesting to its clinical value.

As inconvenient as the procedure sounds, few people complain about it. The results are spectacular, Wolcott says: "I met a woman with a chronic ear infection who was coming back to the phage clinic for her final appointment. They gave her the therapy, and within a week, she was completely cleared up." In fact, studies published over the past several decades, based on trials conducted at Eliava and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, have shown that phage therapy has an 80 to 90 percent success rate against bacteria likely to show antibiotic resistance, such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli.

In contrast, many antibiotics fail outright against the evolved forms of these pathogens. In June 2005, a bacterial strain resistant to the first-line antibiotic imipenem ravaged more than 50 patients at New York City hospitals. Among patients whose infections infiltrated their bloodstream, the death rate was 47 percent.
...
And this is where Wolcott hits a wall. FDA regulators have told him that if he wants to use phages on his patients, he's going to have to carry out a separate clinical trial for each phage or particular mix of phages he hopes to administer, just as he would if he were shepherding distinct chemical compounds through the regulatory process. But since each of his patients' wounds might contain hundreds of different species of bacteria, he can't reasonably attempt to conduct trials of the thousands of phage combinations required to combat them all, especially considering that the cost of a trial for a single drug can easily run into the millions. [A Phase II efficacy trial enrolling 100 to 200 wound patients would cost about $9 million.]

"People in this country have a right to be incensed that we have a very different situation here than in Europe with regards to phage," says Betty Kutter, a phage researcher at Evergreen State College. "Our whole regulatory environment has been one major thing that has slowed people down."

_http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/next-phage