Boosting your gut - Probiotics and chemotherapy

There’s a good body of research around probiotics helping with the side-effects of cancer treatment—especially those currently undergoing chemotherapy.

What are probiotics?
Formally, probiotics are live microorganisms existing in the human body. Informally, probiotics are the good bacteria found in our gut. While that may seem harsh, consider this. When our bodies are functioning correctly there is actually more good bacteria living inside us than there are actual human cells.

So how does this affect chemotherapy?
Chemotherapy is like a really big antibiotic treatment. Its mission is to try and kill as many rapidly dividing “things” in our body—which, unfortunately, includes probiotics. This is a common reason why those undergoing chemotherapy suffer from diarrhea.

There is evidence that a huge dose of probiotics following a chemotherapy session could reinvigorate your gut helping to get your body back on track.

Probiotics is in no way a universal cure for cancer, but it can drastically help the person going through the cancer.

If you think probiotics can help you talk with your doctor about how to safely build probiotics into your cancer treatment plan.

You might also like:

• A few guiding principles around food ...
• Integrative care basics and what others are saying
• Hirsch Holistic Family Medicine Blog (external link)

Comments

[Herbal medication]

This is a great article, and a great topic to explore. Thanks for sharing.