Disclaimer: Any views or advice in this weblog should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, especially if you know you have a specific health complaint. Prescribed medication should not be stopped or varied without conventional medical advice. Please remember that homeopathic remedies and other health measures should be individually-selected to match the whole person, not just the unwelcome symptom. For chronic, severe or long-standing complaints, or if you are pregnant, elderly or on orthodox medications, seek professional advice rather than self-prescribing. People with compromised immune systems should not take probiotics without professional advice.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve been banging on for some time about the importance of probiotics in supporting proper immune functioning. Now there’s yet more evidence of how probiotics can help human health, this time as assistance for alcoholics with cirrhosis-related immune problems.

The new research is very exciting, showing that probiotic supplements may help to restore the immune function of white blood cells in alcoholics.

The study was carried out by researchers at University College London, who gave probiotic suppments to patients with alcoholic cirrhosis. At the start of the study, white blood cell (neutrophil phagocyte) capacity was 25 per cent lower in the people with alcoholic cirrhosis compared to the healthy controls, which is what would be expected. However, at the end of the study, this capacity was normalised in the people receiving the probiotics, which is pretty impressive. No improvements were observed in the alcoholic cirrhosis controls, which is strongly suggestive that the difference was indeed caused by the probiotic supplements.

The study results dramatically showed that neutrophil (white blood cell) function was restored after just four weeks of probiotic supplementation. The researchers are reported in the Journal of Hepatology as saying "Patients with alcoholic cirrhosis are susceptible to infections and once infected, they have increased in-hospital mortality, this may relate to a defective innate immune response in conjunction with an inappropriate inflammatory response.”

This new study adds to a growing body of research on probiotics that suggests having a colony of good gut flora may have wide-reaching health benefits.

Worryingly, even though overuse of antibiotics for non-life threatening health problems has led to the serious issue of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria developing, new patients at the Phoenix Homeopathy clinic still sometimes tell me that they’ve been prescribed up to 15- 20 courses of antibiotics in the course of a year.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics can have a ‘scorched earth’ effect in the gut, decimating colonies of good gut flora, allowing unhelpful yeasts and other organisms to overgrow (this is one of the reasons why it’s common to get thrush after antibiotics) and compromising the immune system, so I find it frustrating that people are still being prescribed antibiotics without being advised to follow the drugs with a course of good-quality, stomach-acid resistant, high gut-adherence probiotics.

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For more information about probiotics, visit www.holistic2go.com