Sometimes I spend more time giving general health and lifestyle advice than treating infectious diseases. I think this is a good thing – I enjoy doing it, but sometimes patients get quite upset when I tell then that they are unlikely to have an infection. This situation arises mostly in the clinic. Often patients are […]

Probiotic supplement use is becoming increasingly popular, as alluded to in the last 3 posts of the blog (see here, here, and here). Compared to a decade ago, probiotics are now prescribed routinely in many hospitals, particularly to patients taking antibiotics. There are numerous brands available on the shelves of most pharmacies and in many […]

During medical school, and then my internal medicine residency training, I don’t remember the topic of probiotics ever coming up. When I started my infectious diseases fellowship in 2009, there was one attending physician who routinely prescribed a particular probiotic supplement to patients taking antibiotics. He made sure to tell us fellows, that there was […]

The other day, I had a patient with recurring bouts of the dreaded Clostridium difficile associated diarrhea (C diff for short; see here for a more detailed discussion about this infection). This is one of the most serious complications of antibiotic therapy. I saw her in the office after, I think, her third episode of […]