Complementary Medicine: A Serious Option as We Are Facing the Problem of Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance

I used to work at the Institute of Environmental Medicine and Hospital Epidemiology with the University Hospital in Freiburg. The institute’s former director, Franz Daschner, a celebrity in antibiotics, had established a research group evaluating complementary medicine, which I was heading at that time. Nearly 20 years ago, I had started to work there and learned a lot about antibiotics and their relationship with resistance, and already then it became pretty clear to me that our therapeutic options to fight bacteria were not only poor, but also the therapeutic reasoning on which it was based was essentially flawed. It is not that antibiotics are useless or do not work. Not at all: they both work and can be life-saving. But what became clear to me was the ‘triple fallacy’ that (i) bacteria (and viruses) are causes of diseases in the proper, scientific, and philosophical sense of the word, (ii) that fighting bacteria is the best therapeutic option, and (iii) that this fight can be won. All 3 propositions are very likely wrong. Add to this the fourth problem: (iv) that our overemphasis on hygiene – using disinfectants, anti-microbial washes, and anti-bacterial this and that – creates the very problem it is designed to solve. Perhaps reminding ourselves of a few basics of microbiology is useful here: most bacteria come in colonies and live together. They have been around some billions of years earlier than any other life on earth, and they will likely still be around when we are long gone. Our cells are functional and effective precisely because many million years ago, single-cell organisms went into a symbiosis with bacteria out of which evolved cells like ours: including former bacteria, namely mitochondria – hundreds, even thousands of them per cell –, that produce the energy we live on. In other words, higher organisms such as warm blooded animals like us would not even have been possible without the energy supply they are harvesting from bacteria that they have at some point included into their biological make-up. Our gut and our skin, in addition to the mitochondria of our cells, are home to an order of magnitude of more bacteria than we have cells in our body. Thus, biologically speaking, we are more like vehicles, homes, and vectors for bacteria. And far from them being a nuisance, we could not even live without them. In the gut, they produce important nutrients, such as B-vitamins, vitamin K, short-chain fatty acids from complex carbohydrates, as nourishment for us and themselves. Only since a few years, we have been receiving data on how important an undisturbed microflora of the gut is for our health and wellbeing. Autoimmune diseases, obesity, and digestive problems seem to be associated with a disturbed microflora, and the overuse of antibiotics is one of the major disturbing factors here [1, 2]. Bacteria can live in sulfuric geysers in Iceland and on the bottom of the sea. They have been discovered in arctic climates as well. If they come under threat from untoPublished online: June 19, 2017