You are my Antibiotic

I began my affair with garlic and its crushed components during the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spring of 2021.  I thought that by this time I might actually not get Covid, since vaccines were suddenly available, and it seemed to be the end of social distancing and all of the panic.  Then, in late January 2021, I started coughing, lost my sense of taste, and suddenly had a fever.  All of this happened a few days after I went to a clinic for treatment for a urinary tract infection.  Here is where it all began.  Here, is where I lost my faith in my care providers to deliver basic antibiotics for what I knew was a urinary tract infection; I had had them repeatedly throughout my adult life and I knew exactly what I had.  But when they tested my urine for bacteria, I was told that the bacteria content wasn’t high enough to diagnose it as an infection.  I protested in disbelief, and thankfully found an urgent care center to give me a prescription for antibiotics.   A few days later my urinary tract infection went away, as I knew it would, but I came down with COVID-19. 

I searched the internet fervently for a natural antibiotic so that I didn’t have to go through this again with my inadequate healthcare team; all the while coughing up my lungs from COVID-19.  I learned that garlic was known to be an effective antibiotic, antifungal, and antiviral medicine.  So, I started preparing food, soups especially, with a good five cloves of garlic.  I then learned that my garlic needed to be crushed or minced for the allicin and other organosulfur compounds to be effective and do their jobs as antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals.  Shortly after this, I learned that the most active and potent organosulfur compounds are only beneficial when raw or left to sit alone for fifteen minutes before using them to cook.  Also, that the potency wears off between thirty minutes and a couple of hours, depending on the garlic clove.   This is precise cooking! My COVID-19 only lasted a few weeks, probably a tribute to my newfound garlic infatuation.

The articles I found online, and books that I read, all only recommended a few cloves of garlic per day to keep the doctor away.  But I wasn’t convinced that this would be effective.  So, I went all out and started crushing entire bulbs of garlic at a time every day, mixed it with hummus and spread it on sourdough bread.  It burned, and stung, but it was also extremely delicious. 

This was the last urinary tract infection I have had, and it is now 2024!  Prior to eating crushed garlic bulbs every day, I had at least four to six urinary tract infections per year.  I was beginning to think that I might have begun to develop an array of diseases of the urinary tract. This is why I am so grateful for all of the information available and am in awe of this miraculous food.

The ability to prove that garlic works as an antibiotic is an added morale booster.  It really does have antibiotic properties and really does actually inhibit common bacterial agents, such as E. coli, H. pylori, K. pneumonioe, C. albicans, group A streptococci, P. gingivalis, and the list goes on.  According to the article, Antifungal and Antibacterial Activities of Allicin, “A variety of scientific evidence shows that allicin has great potential as a therapeutic antimicrobial agent in pharmaceutical products due to high prevalence rates of multi-drug resistant microorganisms”.  Most studies still recommend further studies in plants and animals to negotiate proper dosage, but the groundwork is in place.

My proof that garlic works effectively as an antibiotic was with the cessation of my urinary tract infections.  Recent studies have paved the way for further and more specific studies to take garlic to the next level of medicine, maybe even rivaling current antibiotics that are increasingly less effective against resistant strains of microbes.