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While things are definitely changing, there’s still a good number of medical doctors who consider “alternative” healthcare providers such as myself to be “quacks”.  With increasing regularity though, conventional medical practices that make absolutely no sense from a physiological or scientific basis become popular and widely-used on an unsuspecting public.  It is these practices that have led me to my exclamation of frustration, “And I’m the quack?!!”.

One of these practices is the prescribing of steroids to patients with upper respiratory infections.  Now, while steroids are not my favorite type of drug in general because of their potential side-effects, there are situations in which I think the use of steroids is justified, at least for short-term application in emergency situations.  For example, a severe allergic reaction which without aggressive treatment might otherwise close off a person’s airway and cause him to suffocate would be an appropriate situation for using steroid drugs in my view.

But to prescribe steroids to patients with upper respiratory infections is an incredibly inappropriate use of these drugs in my opinion, yet this practice has become routine in recent years.  A common scenario is a case where a patient catches a cold or flu and develops a cough.  For a variety of reasons, some of these coughs can be quite difficult to get rid of, so a doctor prescribes steroids to alleviate the inflammation in the airways and quiet the cough and other symptoms.  Now that may sound reasonable enough at first, but there’s a teeny little problem with treating someone who has an infection with steroids…

Steroids suppress immune function!  That immune suppression effect isn’t even a side-effect that happens “once in a while”.  That’s an actual intentional effect of using steroid drugs!  That’s why they’re prescribed to people with autoimmune disorders - to suppress the immune system. 

So what do you suppose happens to someone who has an infection and their doctor gives them steroids?  Well, they may have a reduction in the cough and other symptoms at first (which is all the doctor is thinking about - give the patient some symptom relief and they’ll be happy).  But because the steroids suppress the immune system, the body now is unable to fight the infection effectively. 

But that’s no problem, because then the doctor can give the patient antibiotics, right?  Well, the doctor can do that, but in most cases it doesn’t help anything because the infection is usually from a virus, which is immune to antibiotics.  So now you’ve got an immune system that’s not working, plus you’ve killed off the healthy bacteria in your GI tract with the antibiotics, leaving you wide open for all sorts of new infections (but that’s a subject for another time). 

So you stay sick (and maybe add some additional infections while you’re at it) for a long time.  But wait, there’s even more goodness that steroids bring:  weight gain, water retention/bloating, mood swings - now that’s a party!  And that’s just the short-term stuff.  Long-term use of steroids is associated with osteoporosis and tissue and organ damage.  Good stuff, huh?

But you wouldn’t need to worry about the long-term problems if you were just taking the steroids for a little while until you get over your cough, right?  Remember though, your immune system is suppressed, so it takes forever to fight off the infection.  When you run out of your steroid prescription, the cough comes back.  If you don’t know better, you go back to the doctor and he does what to help your cough?  He gives you steroids again!!!!

…and I’m the quack?!!

So what should you do to handle upper respiratory infections?

Stay tuned to my natural remedies blog for more upcoming posts on this topic.

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