Bacterial Vaginosis – is Antibiotics a Good Option?
If you’re a woman that suffers or has reoccurrences with BV, you might have noticed that using antibiotics for bacterial vaginosis might not work as well as you hoped. Moreover, now there is more than just conventional treatment, there are different lotions and creams to help with symptom relief.
One of the problems with bacterial vaginosis is that you can catch it. There are many different ways to get BV, and there’s no easy way to cure this issue, even using an antibiotic cream. The whole reason for doctors prescribing antibiotic ointments on bacterial vaginosis is because the antibiotics kill off the bacteria so it cannot continue to get worse.
What is bacterial vaginosis you may ask? It is an imbalance of natural bacteria in a woman’s vagina. For a woman a normal healthy vagina is mildly acidic, which attracts growth of healthy bacteria. Sometimes something will happen and cause the ph levels to slightly shift and become off balance, and will create symptoms of burning and itching sensations in the vagina, and will also create a liquid discharge of a foul fishy smell.
Taking antibiotics for bacterial vaginosis will most definitely kill the bad bacteria. However, the antibiotics cannot distinguish between good and bad bacteria so all will be lost, and your body will have to reproduce the good bacteria. In a majority of cases, as soon as you finish the antibiotic cycle, the vagina cannot reproduce the good bacteria quick enough to fight against the bad bacteria and will cause for a re-outbreak of BV. This is a huge reason why in most cases women who get bacterial vaginosis will have it re-occurring again within a few weeks.
Although you can use antibiotics to kill off the bad bacteria, it does not solve the reason what’s causing this problem of BV in the first place.
Other treatments strategies to take into consideration are: strengthen the immune system, rebalancing the ph levels, examining and start treatments on the root cause, introduce good bacteria back to the vagina, etc.
Just keep in mind that you can try any of these options to help with bacterial vaginosis, and you may start to think about other possibilities of a cure as to using antibiotics, because all and all any of these treatments are only temporary.