Herbal Antibiotics Quotes

“Invasive plants—Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Seven people with MRSA-infected wounds were treated with honey after antibiotics failed to eradicate the infection. All were successfully treated.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“A chronic wound in a patient with dystrophis epidermolysis bullosa was treated. The wound, despite many treatments, had never closed in 20 years. A honey-impregnated dressing closed and healed the wound in 15 weeks.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“A number of other studies have been conducted on the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers and all have found comparable outcomes. For example: 60 people with limb-threatening diabetic infections were split into three groups: 1) full-thickness skin ulcer; 2) deep-tissue infection and osteomyelitis; 3) gangrenous lesions. All ulcers in group 1 healed and 92 percent of those in group 2 healed. All people in group 3 healed after surgical excision, debridement of necrotic tissue, and treatment with honey ointment (which also included royal jelly).”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“One of the most important things to remember in treating Gram-negative infections is that the use of a synergist will significantly increase the impact of the herbs on the bacteria.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The primary herbs used to treat streptococcal bacteria are cryptolepis, sida, alchornea, bidens (though you’ll need to use larger doses, for longer), the berberine plants, juniper, usnea, lomatium, honey, echinacea, licorice, ginger, and red root.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The main herbs to treat MRSA are cryptolepis, sida, alchornea, bidens, black pepper, the berberines, usnea, juniper berry, isatis, licorice, ginger, ashwagandha, echinacea, red root, reishi, honey, and Artemisia annua.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Enterococcal organisms cause urinary tract infections, bacteremia, bacterial endocarditis, diverticulitis, and meningitis. The primary herbs to treat them are sida, alchornea, cryptolepis, bidens, ginger, echinacea, juniper berry, usnea, Artemisia annua, honey (I know, it’s not exactly an herb), licorice, oregano oil, and Acacia aroma. If you are treating a really tough vancomycin-resistant enterococcal infection, add ginger juice to your formulation; it strongly inhibits resistance mechanisms in these bacteria.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Piperine Warning Under no circumstances should you use piperine for severe intestinal infections such as E. coli O157:H7 or cholera. Piperine increases intestinal permeability, which can allow the resistant organisms access to the interior of your body in significantly greater numbers. It can make you much sicker.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Because Gram-positive bacteria have only a single cell wall, even though it’s thicker, they are, in general, much easier to treat. With Gram-negative bacteria, two cell walls have to be penetrated, not just one. In essence, the bacteria have two chances to identify and deactivate an antibacterial that is hostile to them. Even if an antibiotic gets into the periplasmic space, it usually will not kill the bacteria. It still has to penetrate the second wall.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Salmonella, which is now genetically lodged in the ovaries (and hence the eggs that come from them) of many agribusiness chickens, can survive refrigeration, boiling, basting, and frying. To kill salmonella bacteria the egg must be fried hard or boiled for 9 minutes or longer.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The prodigious production of antibacterial soaps that end up going into the water are stimulating resistance among many classes of bacteria as well.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Hospitals, where large numbers of pathogenic bacteria and antibiotics come into frequent contact, give bacteria the most opportunity to develop resistance and virulence. Researchers examining the effluent streams from hospitals have found them to contain exceptionally large numbers of resistant bacteria as well as large amounts of excreted antibiotics.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Staphylococcus organisms are “the leading cause of pus-forming skin and soft tissue infections, the leading cause of infectious heart disease, the number one hospital acquired infection, and one of the four leading causes of food-borne illness.”23​➔​ And”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The fairly recent discovery that all of the water supplies in the industrialized countries are contaminated with minute amounts of antibiotics (from their excretion into water supplies) means that bacteria everywhere are experiencing low doses of antibiotics all the time. This exposure is exponentially driving resistance learning; the more antibiotics that go into the water, the faster the bacteria learn.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Sometimes bacteria learn how to live and prosper in antimicrobial environments, such as the cleaning solutions in hospitals. As one journal article put it, “Contamination, mainly by Gram-negative bacteria, was found in 10 freshly prepared solutions and in 21 of 22 at discard.”15​➔​ Sometimes, they even learn to use the antibiotics for food.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“To avoid this infiltration the bacteria alter the permeability of their cell membranes, often by altering the structure of the doorways that let outside substances into the cell. This makes it harder, or impossible, for antibiotics to sneak in — essentially keeping the level of the drug below that needed to affect the bacteria.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. Dr. Fleming noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered, and in a 1945 New York Times interview, he warned that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria. Fleming’s observations were prescient. At the time of his interview just 14 percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were resistant to penicillin; by 1953, as the use of penicillin became widespread, 64 percent to 80 percent of the bacteria had become resistant and resistance to tetracycline and erythromycin was also being reported. (In 1995 an incredible 95 percent of staph was resistant to penicillin.) By 1960 resistant staph had become the most common source of hospital-acquired infections worldwide.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“In fact, other than factory farms, hospitals and doctors’ offices are the primary breeding ground of superbugs. A simple injection or a minor surgery can now, fairly routinely, lead to months in the hospital, or loss of limb, or loss of life.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“You’re just living a normal life — never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said. The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.1​➔​ Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don’t, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren’t even that “lucky.” Denis”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“A ubiquitous phrase encountered in obituaries is “died from complications following surgery,” but what is not well understood is that these “complications” are quite frequently multi-drug resistant infections. —”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“for bacteria do not develop resistance to plant medicines. They can’t. For plants have been dealing with bacteria a great deal longer than the human species has even existed, some 700 million years.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful among them. We lose the synergy when we take out the solitary compound. But most important, we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plants, may be our best hope for confronting drug-resistant bacteria.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“When the drug vancomycin falls completely by the wayside, as it will, we may, just as Stephen predicts here and I have predicted elsewhere, fall back on the bimillennial biblical medicinal herbs such as garlic and onion. These herbs each contain dozens of mild antibiotic compounds (some people object to using the term “antibiotic” to refer to higher plant phytochemicals, but I do not share their disdain for such terminology). It is easy for a rapidly reproducing bug or bacterial species to outwit (out-evolve) a single compound by learning to break it down or even to use it in its own metabolism, but not so easy for it to outwit the complex compounds found in herbs.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Or as Steven Projan of Wyeth Research puts it, bacteria “are the oldest of living organisms and thus have been subject to three billion years of evolution in harsh environments and therefore have been selected to withstand chemical assault.”10”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“Importantly, Haemophilus are what are called fastidious bacteria, meaning they need an iron source to grow, and unlike most other bacteria, they usually get it from the hemoglobin in our blood to which iron is bonded (giving blood its red color). Protecting the blood cells through the use of something like sida is crucial in treating this kind of infection.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The plant also has a strong antipyretic effect, comparable to acetaminophen. It is specific for lowering fever during acute infections.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“The plant loves disturbed places, especially agriculturally disturbed fields, and actively tries to colonize cultivated land. It is allelopathic (toxic to other plants) and can reduce domesticated crops up to 50 percent once it invades a planted field. It is considered highly noxious in scores of countries just for that reason. The plant has very few natural predators. I like it.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria

“For this plant to act as a potent antimicrobial, it must be prepared as a tincture of the fresh plant or the fresh juice must be used.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner, Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria