are we just hearing about biofilms cuz we have research on them was this a problem for people 200 years ago 500 years ago thousand years ago what's going on Welcome to my YouTube channel I'm Dr a and I've been treating patients with complex chronic illness for decades also been involved in teaching and research around integrated medicine for 30 years now and we use this channel to answer a lot of questions get into integrated medicine topics and what we want to do today the topic of biofilms I want to break that down the first thing is
that we have to understand you know what a biofilm is but also we have to understand that there is a difference between normal biofilms and pathological or damaging biofilms how's that work well biofilms are created anywhere in a system where there's moisture so in humans and other mammals It's usually the respiratory system the mucosa there digestive system and then some inside of the vascular system the next thing you want to think of is just like we have normal bacteria that are good for us in our digestive system we have normal levels of biofilms and those
are not what we're talking about so you want to think of biofilms on a spectrum and if we went from the left side where we had normal biofilms no problem but then we get stressors on our immune system stresses on our digestive tract respiratory system Etc and we might start to make biofilms and then you can think of them going from normal and okay to thicker and more pathological more potentially damaging to really thick and very potentially damaging pathological I tend to break these up into what we call physiologic or normal and then Phase One
versus Phase 2 biofilms so the first thing is everyone's got them they don't all have to be bad and our goal of treatment is not to you know eliminate all of them but when you have somebody who been sick a long time or somebody who's gotten a ton of you know antibiotics or biological medications other stuff they can start to grow bacteria that will create a bofilm now the next thing about the pathological Phase 1 versus Phase 2 biofilms is it's not just the bug that made the bofilm because there's certain bacteria that like to
make biofilms that's great but other organisms will get in the bofilm too and they become a hive a community so you might have the original bacteria like pseud onus some of the other biofilm forming bacteria and inside the bofilm there might be some viruses some fungus some parasites all sorts of stuff going on and there's a couple of things about that this is why the phase 1 and Two Become pathological or dangerous and what happens is the bigger the bofilm gets the more creatures are in there few things happen one is it can be very
difficult to kill them because they're protected the second is if they have a particular genetic sequence that makes them resist into drugs or something they can share that with the other members of their little bofilm community and then there's other things they can avoid the immune systems they'll know it's there Etc that's why the biofilms become more of a problem a lot of bugs together the bigger the hive is the more damaging and dangerous it is so when you see treatment resistant infections a piece of the puzzle can be biofilms so we'll pick on pseudomonas
today usually it's ponus or rugino and that's a very common you know bad respiratory infection you can have it in your gut Gets In Your Eyes can actually make you a blind if you don't kill it it's a b bad bug but it's really hard to kill with antibiotics and that's partially because of its genetics but it's also because ponus loves to make bofilm and so you might not had a bofilm in this place before it might have been one of those normal ones and ponus gets there and it's like well we got to protect
ourselves so it starts to build this scaffolding and that's what creates the biofil effect and that's part of what makes it so hard to kill so in treatment resistant infections what we often see is we need a bofilm approach and an anti-infective approach together the next thing is you have to be careful if you have a very chronically ill person this could be a young person maybe with pans or pandas that kind of spectrum could be a you know older teenager or an adult anyone who's been chronically sick and they probably the longer you're chronically
ill the more biofilms you build up so you think well let's go in guns blazing and open the biofilms up forcibly and go treat all these bugs not a bad idea but here's one of the things and I've seen this clinically it doesn't matter what your age is it's how big your biofilms are you go in with a really strong bofilm agent it opens up and your immune system is suddenly overwhelmed with all these infectious creatures that didn't really think were there because they've been hiding in the bofilm now what is an over response of
the immune system look like and why is that dangerous well it creates this huge inflammatory response a person might be going from you know I don't feel great cuz I'm chronically ill but I kind of have a even Keel to why did suddenly I have fill in the blank just flare up might be gut might be skin might be mucous membranes also can be the brain so if you take somebody who has a neurological infectious autoimmune combo like pans pandas you see this in a lot of neural ological autoimmunity and they're kind of at an
even Keel and then you start to boost the inflammation because you open all these biofilms well that's the good part part you have to be careful with clinically is if that goes to their brain I've seen people stop sleeping because the inflammation I've seen people get suicidal I've seen people have all sorts of other problems so it's not that you can't deal with those things but you have to go into it knowing that if I do open these biofilms and especially if they're phase one or phase two where they're kind of complicated I need to
have enough anti-infective support to kill whatever comes out but I also need some anti-inflamatory support to keep this person from having their brain overdo it or their gut blow up or their skin blow up or whatever so it's a clinical management issue so when do we see these things biofilms well people with chronic upper and lower respiratory infections so upper respiratory goes all the way from your sinuses down you know through your throat Etc lower respiratory gets in your trachea bronchi and the rest of your lungs so all of the things where you breathe people
with chronic digestive problems people with treatment resistant you know parasites and other things in the gut or just some of these bacteria also we commonly see these and people with the inflammatory bowel diseases irritable bowel syndrome Crohn colitis all of those things very common to see also in bacterial overgrowth syndromes like sibo and sio which is fungal but it's an overgrowth syndrome the biofilms are pretty common in those States as well people with chronic allergies and you might say allergies biofilms but what we're getting at here is there are triggers especially in the digestive tract
or respiratory tract where if certain types of infectious agents hiding in a bofilm they can be triggering your immune system to raise the IG e like Edward imunoglobulin E which is associated with with allergy and anaphylaxis you raise those you also sometimes see IG go up in people with atopic dermatitis like eczema things like that so as the IG goes up your allergies trigger easier well it's usually not the only reason but if I have biofilms holding on to a whole bunch of creatures that make my Ig go up then they can be a piece
of the allergy picture the other one which is another sort of secondary problem is brain fog concentration issues and again that can be because you have this chonic inflammatory thing going on that you eat different things and the the bugs that are in the biofil will get very excited and they might you know start to metabolize what you're eating before you get it that might throw off your your insulin uh production might throw off a number of other things you can feel that in your brain not uncommon with people with chronic autoimmune conditions beyond the
digestive ones that we talked about especially the longer term they've been sick the more drugs are on Etc to have biofilms people who have chronic in infections of any kind we often call them stealth infections cuz they're sort of hiding in the background and you might have 10 neighbors that have a little bit of each of these infections they have no symptoms from them this person they've got them and they've made sort of a bad deal with the person's immune system so they're in the background and their major symptoms are nondescript fatigue nondescript pain things
of that nature chronic infectious people very very common where do we start thinking about biofilms well the first thing is and this is a really legit question it comes up a lot is are we just hearing about biofilms cuz we have research on them was this a problem for people 200 years ago 500 years thousand years ago what's going on well here's the first thing is and this is real similar to what we talked about with you know Prebiotic foods and your normal flora in your gut the way that we normally traditionally have kept the
gut Flora the way it's supposed to be is by different dietary things well it turns out when it comes to biofilms prevention can be at a very low level if you're eating the stuff every day the preventive factors and if you look at any indigenous diet around the world there will be different ones but they will have these preventive factors in the Indigenous diet and so one of the things Beyond antibiotics and all this other stuff that probably affects today's people especially in westernized culture is we don't really eat whatever our indigenous diet was so
a lot of protective factors are not there so what are they they tend to be aromatic herbs and spices and it doesn't matter what part of the world you come from if you look at the herbs and spices that are used in that part of the world most of them have an antibiofilm effect now I'm pretty sure that when they came up with the idea to use these herbs and spices in cooking and food storage all this they didn't say oh they this will break up the biofilms but they did it because it improved the
taste it made it last longer people got less sick when they ate the food whatever right so you might see aromatic and polyphenol type of herbs and spices like curries for example or like other herbal mixtures in other parts of the world parts of my Heritage come from the really cold Northern parts of Scandinavia and they would use a lot of you know pine needles and you know a lot of you know trees with a lot of aromatic extracts and juniper berries and all sorts of other stuff you go to Native American parts of different
type parts of North America you see the same things you go to haia you see the same things so again if the person is eating these as part of almost every meal that they have where their food is stored with these things they have a natural antibiofilm effect so you might say to yourself well could I just start eating like Curry every day and break all of the biofilms and the answer is it depends how pathogenic they are if it's a preventive that works really well those herbal things work really well when you get to
the deeper ones then you often need aromatic type herbs and your dietary Stuff Plus plus maybe a little bit more so a little bit more and that' be like your phase one biofilms can be done with maybe some higher doses of an aromatic like oregano oil as a supplement okay that they'll just go get oil and take it there are supplements made for this other aromatic type oils that come from things that are in supplements be specifically made to help break biofilms there's also things like the artificial or non sugar sweetener Stevia Xylitol those things
work on lowgrade biofilms as well and then there there's a whole bunch other things like enzymes Etc get to phase 2 biofilms these are more pathogenic these were actually ones that are published and written about that the CDC and other government Health agencies are concerned with especially around Hospital transmission of resistant infections and War wounds and some pretty bad things but I can tell you is I've seen phase two the bigger batter biofilms in most of my chronically old patients these are ones we have to be very careful when you open them up is they
may be hiding a lot of bugs and so there's a management issue there now with Phase 2 biofilms there are some very specific formulas that are made for bofilm opening and then you get into prescription level bofilm opening such as combinations they call them bis Styles and that's a long chemistry discussion but bis styles are used as drugs to go and they literally wedge into the bofilm and hold it open so that the immune system can see in there or the anti-infective drug whatever can get in there and so when you get to that in
the Spectrum you really need a lot of clinical management around that but chronically if you're generally healthy just like eating Prebiotic foods helps you with your good floor and you're got eating either whatever your native you know herbs and spices are or whatever the local herbs and spices are it doesn't really matter as long as you're doing that on a regular basis that will be very helpful as well on the preventive side all right I'm Dr R I hope that answered some of the bi film questions if you are interested in this one we're going
to link a couple of other videos here check it out check out the description box but I'm going to see you on the next video thanks
