Reply to The "New" Strep Throat

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]not to be the dumbass but why does something so mild need treatment at all?[/quote]

yes not all strep needs antibiotics![/quote]

Really? I've heard that for ear infections, but not for strep.[/quote]

NP here. Like 10% of kids are permanently colonized by strep A (the kind that causes strep throat) asymptomatically. Others can usually clear it with their immune systems. But if untreated it can sometimes develop into more severe disease.

I'm more on the side of taking a "wait and see" approach than asking for a culture every time, though. My brother was a strep carrier and my siblings and I were on antibiotics about every month for years because the dr would do a culture for him if he has anything (a cold, flu, allergies, etc) and prescribe them to the siblings, too. Finally ended when he cultured my bro at a well visit on my mom's insistence and was like "I'll be damned." All my siblings have issues with antibiotics (allergies, etc) due to being on them too much as children. We also struggle with weight (a side effect of overuse of abx), so I don't want my kids to go through that. It's a tough call sometimes.[/quote]

What?  Weight gain and allergies are due to antibiotics?  I understand they're being over prescribed, but let's not go too far.[/quote]

You should go read about the gut biome and what doctors and researchers are discovering (I'm guessing that learning and understanding about this will severely limit the amount of fat shaming you feel entitled to do). And, yes: it might be linked to antibiotic use![/quote]

A PP here. I'm not a fat shamer. I'm the mom of a child with PANDAS. Our doctors (three separate ones, including one VERY holistic minded doctor) have said that we simply must do prophylactic antibiotics with my son. But I have read the same studies and this worries me. We have a very strong family history of auto-immune disorders. Everyone in my family has something from MS to crohns to celiac. I escaped relatively lightly with (so far and touch wood) only mild IBS that I can control with diet. Strep is serious, serious business for my kids, but at the same time, so are antibiotics. It's not good, on a micro level, to wipe out your gut flora constantly. In fact, we've had issues with candida and stomach upset due to the antibiotics. But, the weight thing seems very real (DS is a rail, but that doesn't mean he always will be). I think there are things that we do that are still very unknown. For example, antibiotics are what we know right now. We also know that right now some children have huge problems with the way they respond to strep. (It's not usually strep that is the issue, it's the way the body reacts to it - it's almost always an antibody thing that causes these complications, not the strep A itself).

Anyway, for right now, based on what we know and what we are still guessing, I'm going with treat it. If I had a child who could bounce back and defeat strep handily, that's great! I would probably take a wait and see approach. but I do not think that you can safely assume strep will just go away. If a kid has a sore throat and gets over it, great! But if your kid has a sore throat and starts having out of character OCD type tantrums, etc, take heed. And with PANDAS it's more obvious because there are behavioral issues that are very sudden and extremely noticeable. I don't know if the same is true for rheumatic heart fever, which we're fortunate not to be dealing with (again touch wood).

Incidentally, my kids never had antibiotics for anything until PANDAS hit. DS was four at the time. Some people think that these autoimmune things might be related to having had antibiotics at birth or in the early years (on their own or through mom) but that was not the case for us. [/quote]

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