Garlic and medicine

Garlic has many wonderful uses. It is good for helping to prevent several forms of cancer, it lessens arterial hardening due to cholesterol in persons who are not already at a high level, it's a known vasodilator, and it's a great expectorant. It is a wonderful topical antibiotic, and when used as such is even a lowlevel antiviral compound.

What it is not, however, is an internal antibiotic. Your stomach acid promptly breaks down the polysulfides (which give it the topical usage) into the vasodilative compound mentioned above.

Let's make this crystal clear: garlic is a wonderful TOPICAL antibiotic. A garlic compound spray could work better than even Bactine.. just remember to wipe it off after a bit or allow it to absorb into a bandage rather than spray directly on a wound. In fact, it's often overkill to leave it on a potentially infective entry point for too long because it will also kill healthy cells in high enough concentration. Ingesting garlic has absolutely no antibiotic properties of any kind; that is nonsense. People are mistaking it's properties as a vasodilator and expectorant for antibiotic ones. Garlic treats the symptoms of bacterial infections internally, it absolutely does NOT treat the cause.

Just because it's making you feel better does not mean it is actually making you better. That said, feeling better IS important for recovery, when you are happy your immune system works better, but that does not make garlic an internal antibiotic any more than chicken soup is an internal antiviral. These particular folk remedies ease you and comfort you, which allows your immune system to do it's job better; nothing more. Reading your favorite book and avoiding stress would do the same job and better.

I suppose in theory if injected it would be an internal antibiotic... but "biotic" means "living thing". It'll happily kill friendly cells as well as unfriendly ones. I'm not willing to risk it any more than I would ingest the necessary amount of silver to suspend in my flesh to create a small internal antibiotic use. Your skin will be grey long before you derive any usage of it.

Allow me to go more in depth about how internal antibiotics work. Read this part carefully. Internal antibiotics generally do NOT directly kill the infection! In fact, most are simply bacteriostatic. The ingested compounds enter your bloodstream and slow the growth of the bacteria. That's all they do, slow down the bacterial growth and reproductive cycle.

Bactericidal substances (such as lysol, bactine, garlic, silver) do destroy bacteria, but they do so by permeating their cellular walls and causing effects ranging from not allowing the bacteria to take in needed nutrients or oxygen, to flatout drying the bacteria out until they die. Now, I will back this off a bit. In high enough concentrations, most bacteriostatics are also bactericidal. However, that is an incidental sideffect, it is your own immune system doing the work with the bacteriostatic aid that helps you get better.

Bactericidal compounds are topical. Bacteriostatic compounds are internal.  An easy way to remember it is this: if it works when you rub it on, it invariably has little to NO use when ingested.

Everyone knows that pouring alcohol on a wound will cleanse it. Everyone also knows that drinking alcohol has no internal antibiotic properties (beyond the throat). You don't swallow lysol pills, you don't drink your antibacterial soap. It's almost frightening quackery to claim garlic or silver are any different. The human body simply does not work that way. Anyone who says otherwise is willfully ignoring thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, most of it from the _exact same old sources_ they claim backs their quackery. You might as well talk about the amazing benefits of mercury while you're at it, cause that's something they used to give people doses of in the "old days" as well as an antibiotic, simply because it was a decent topical antiseptic.