Why are more and more people today turning to natural remedies rather than antibiotics?

Most antibiotics are designed to be lethal to a group of pathogens. But because of the way they work, most, if not all, man-made antibiotics suppress the immune system.

In addition, the overuse of these drugs has been responsible for empowering a host of resistant microbes. As a result, a whole crop of “Superbug” germs are completely unaffected by modern antibiotics.

Because of microorganisms’ mutations in defense, antibiotics hardly create therapeutic effects any longer. A bacterium’s antibiotics receptors don’t form. Bacterial immunological genes are a factor too. The bacteria have returned with a vengeance because they are moving targets. If just one in a population of a billion develops a random gene mutation that allows it to survive an antibiotic attack, it passes its immunity off to its offspring.

For example, some of the microbes that first developed immunity to penicillin did so by altering the shape of the cell wall target to which the drug normally attached.

Over the years the pharmaceutical companies have responded with antibiotics. But the microorganisms kept upping the ante by altering their own defenses with immunological genes.

The “Superbugs” are able to cooperate with each other to resist the antibiotics by exchanging small self-copying loops of DNA called plasmids. These organisms contain “jumping genes” — bits of DNA that pop from one microbe to another.

“Bacteria are not separate populations, but part of a vast, interactive microbial world.” Says Stuart Levy, M.D. of Tufts University.

Bacteria replicate at blinding speed inside the body and can quickly pass on their genetic armor to their offspring. Some of these “super microbes” mutate into a “multi drug-resistant strain.”