 SIBO and CFO are becoming more and more common with our modern, high-radiation environments causing oxidative damage to the digestive organs, particularly the liver, impairing food absorption, which allows bacteria and fungi to proliferate. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal fungal overgrowth. Digestive issues like these, as well as Candida, aren't considered real by many doctors and most mainstream medical advice. If you tried to Google this a couple years ago, it was like a conspiracy. You usually have to go to a specialist or some type of naturopath. Even so, the issues are commonly misdiagnosed and improperly treated the majority of the time even by the experts as they've never experienced the issue themselves. So today we're going to try to understand the different pharmaceutical treatments for SIBO and CFO. That way, if you or a family member is seeing a doctor, you can gauge their understanding and expertise. And by no means am I suggesting you use any of these. I think herbal remedies are far better, but require a lot of research and a lot more convincing for the average person. Starting with Raffaximin, which is an antibiotic typically used for treating travelers' diarrhea and liver issues, it's derived from a chemical produced by bacteria called rifamycin, which naturally inhibits bacterial replication by suppressing RNA synthesis. It has an approximate 40% effectiveness when used on its own, which is actually comparable to herbal therapies. And doctors will typically use a breath test to measure bacterial activity in the upper digestive tract. So what they do is they give you like a mix of certain types of sugar and you breathe into a tube to see if there is a bacteria producing different types of gas, methane, and I believe hydrogen. So you can have methane dominant SIBO or hydrogen dominant SIBO, but that's a discussion for a whole different video. But once that breath test is lowered, you know, there's no urea being excreted by the bacteria, it's considered eradicated. So that's how they're gauging the effectiveness of these treatments. Now in some people, this works. Most of the time it's temporary and the bacteria finds its way back into the upper digestive tract as the underlying issues that cause the infection weren't resolved. And I would bet that SIBO and SIFO have the highest recurring rates in regards to going back to the doctor because they don't actually know how to heal people. Next up is Neomycin, an antibiotic that is usually prescribed topically. Sometimes they combine it orally with herfaxamine to treat bacterial overgrowth in constipated patients. It's effective against aerobic gram negative bacteria. And most of the drugs we're discussing today target a specific thing as opposed to being broad spectrum, which is one of the benefits of herbal options. Just like herfaxamine, Neomycin is produced from a certain strain of bacteria and acts on the RNA component. So very similar mechanisms, very similar drug. And to me it looks like most of these drugs have been isolated from the antibacterial or antifungal component of a natural strain of bacteria or fungus, which are actually properties we see in most probiotics, reinforcing the fact that probiotics are needed to permanently fix gut microbiome damage. Each of these medications used on their own have a similar effectiveness, 30 to 40 percent, but when combined together upwards of 90 percent. So when someone's taking herfaxamine plus Neomycin, they're really bombing out everything in their gut, which is a good thing to doctors, but in reality it's a bad thing. For the antifungals, we have nystatin, which is very common. And as with Neomycin, it's usually topical. It's not used for like a candida gut infection. It's a yeast infection in some other part of the body. And it's not as harsh as other antifungals. The mechanism of action is nystatin binding to the component of fungal cell membranes, resulting in the death of the cell. But it can also bind to other cells in our body, including cholesterol, doing the same thing. So it's toxic and high concentrations. Now that's why you're taking it orally to hopefully destroy the overgrowth in your stomach and then it gets detoxed by your liver before it can really damage the body too much. As with refaxamine and Neomycin, nystatin is also isolated from a bacterial strain. That's how they create this drug. The difference is that this has antifungal properties as opposed to antibacterial properties. Flucanazole, also known as diflucan, is an antifungal used to treat more severe infections. Most of the time, again, as with the nystatin, it's not in the stomach. It's like foam will take over of some part of the body and organ in an immuno-compromised patient. It inhibits cytochrome P450 enzymes, which are present in most tissues in the body and play such a large role in our metabolism that you don't want to be taking this for a long period of time. This is a lot harsher than any of these other drugs and can damage the liver also causes birth defects. Whenever you hear a medication causes birth defects, you know it's messing something up really bad from an organ perspective. Now, since it's an antifungal, it targets Candida species, various yeast in your digestive tract by blocking the ability of the fungus to reproduce. The effectiveness is actually similar to nystatin on its own. However, doctors will typically give Flucanazole only when nystatin doesn't work, which really doesn't make any sense. I guess different mechanism of action, different funguses are targeted. One might work for some, one might work for another, either way, not nearly as safe as some other options. Now, if you've ever read the ingredient list on a bottle of Peptobismol, you might have seen bismuth, and we have bismuth solicylate, which is considered an antacid and anti-diarrheal. It's the active ingredient in Peptobismol, and it's prescribed in this protocol that's used to treat H. pylori. Once in the body, bismuth has bactericidal, antibacterial, and antimicrobial activity, mainly by preventing bacteria from binding to and growing on the mucosal cells in the stomach in the small intestine. In anti-microbial protocols, this is referred to as biofilm busting, biofilms being like a protective mucous membrane that the bacteria and fungus create, making them very difficult to kill. I've seen this spoken about once, I haven't really heard of it being prescribed, but I can assume that doctors know about it, and it's used in severe, severe cases of SIBO, CFO, Candida, and some specialists. It could be possible that these antibiotics and antifungals are so strong on their own that something like bismuth solicylate is not necessary. However, when you combine smaller amounts of multiple things, and this has a very important function of actually breaking that mucous down, you don't have to damage the body with such high doses of antibiotics, and you can get the job done. Either way, you don't want to be using any of this stuff. Now as we said earlier, if you go to your average doctor, they've probably never heard of this. They don't think it's real, and even if you go to a specialist, like a gastrointestinal, still never heard of this stuff, they'll prescribe you a proton pump inhibitor. So if you do come across a naturopath, a doctor, someone that does understand all of these things, hopefully they're intelligent enough to point you in the direction of the herbal options. Unfortunately, money is always the main thing on these people's minds, and in order for them to make money, you're not going to get better. And I've had so many people email me after spending thousands and thousands of dollars, and I asked them what that naturopath or doctor suggested to them, and it's absolutely pathetic that I'm still fucking sitting here in my parents' house. It's actually disgusting. So obviously, you take these antibiotics, whatever, you bomb out all of the bacteria, and then it just comes back because you did not introduce the probiotics. You cleaned off the slate, but you did not introduce what's supposed to be there. Now in all the studies I've looked at, and from what I've read, herbal remedies are just as effective if you understand the right combination of antimicrobials, typically, oregano oil plus berberine with NAC and acetylcysteine taken in the correct amounts over the course of a week or two can set the stage for the probiotics, the water kefir to be introduced, and finally get your stomach to where it's supposed to be. You can check out my past videos on the gut microbiome if you haven't. I mean, honestly, I don't even know why I made this video. I'm not getting paid enough to talk about this shit. So we're going to wrap it up here. So thank you guys for joining me. Please drop a like on the video, leave a comment down below, subscribe so that YouTube can unsubscribe you next week, and be sure to check that notification bell so they don't notify you of my videos. Therefore, you can go to frank-fano.com to support me through all of my businesses. Honestly, I was going to talk about some more stuff, but I'm like completely over this shit, so oh well.