Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
If you’ve ever wondered why some people get strep throat over and over and over again, sometimes even just days after a strep infection was supposedly eradicated with antibiotics, here’s the likely answer as explained by old-time MDs who practiced medicine before the modern love affair with prescription drugs got its start.
Most people are far too quick to run and get a prescription for antibiotics and never give their immune system a chance to build any resistance whatsoever. Most never consider the use of home remedies for strep throat either.
Conventional doctors today do a great job of scaring people out of their minds about the possibility of rheumatic fever/heart damage from allowing the body to deal with a strep throat infection unmedicated. However, the truth is, the risk of complications from strep throat is very small for healthy people who have no issues with their immune system. Even WebMD used to state (before pharmaceutical industry pressure forced a change in language to only mention antibiotics) that strep throat will go away on its own with or without treatment in 3-7 days.
I’ve written before about the one and only case of strep throat I ever had. It occurred when I was 15 and I am ever so grateful my MD father loved me enough to let me fight through it and win without antibiotics. The result? I’ve never ever gotten strep throat again despite repeated exposures. One exposure was in very close quarters – a college roommate had strep throat and I still didn’t contract it! What’s even more interesting is that none of my children have ever had strep either despite multiple exposures from friends and classmates.
I obviously built up a strong resistance to strep throat at a young age and have been blessed with never having to suffer with it again by allowing my body to fight through it naturally. It’s also quite possible I passed on my immunity to my children via breastfeeding, although that is obviously just an educated guess on my part.
The article I wrote on my personal strep throat story has invited both ridicule and applause over the past couple of years. Some folks have angrily emailed me saying I am crazy and putting people’s lives in danger by suggesting that forgoing meds for strep is the best way to go if one is in good health.
For others, the article triggered an “aha moment” with more than just a few deciding once and for all to stare down the strep throat demon and win!
One such inspiring story crossed my inbox recently and the strep throat victim was none other than professional singer Martin DeBourge!
Here’s what Martin had to say:
As a singer, getting strep throat every single year is not only frustrating, but vocally debilitating! So when it hit again this year, and I felt it coming on, I decided a new course of action was in order.
I spent a day researching. The one article that really rang true for me was on your website about whether antibiotics for strep are really necessary. You talked about how you “muscled through it” when you had strep throat as a teenager, and how your body may have even built an immunity against it.
That sounded great to me! But, I am well aware of the massive pain strep throat can cause. Just swallowing fluid is excruciating, let alone solid foods. So I needed a sort of “healthy second opinion”.
I called fellow friend and vocalist David Katz in New York. I knew he was an herbalist, but most importantly, he would understand my plight as a singer needing to do what’s best for my pipes. He runs a website and has an herbal product line JUST for singers, so I knew he was the right guy.
He ALSO encouraged me to steer clear of the antibiotics and gave me a few suggestions to “get through it”.
I braced myself for at least 10 days of bed ridden fever, throat swelling and sickness. Like I said, I’ve been through this numerous times before, so I knew what I was in for. I didn’t clear my singing schedule though, hoping for the best.
To my amazement, the strep “spots” started clearing within a couple days. I had my voice back in 36 hours! I was floored… and convinced.
Martin kept a daily log of his strep throat home remedies adventure outlined below. Hopefully, it will inspire more than just a few others to take the leap themselves.
Effective Strep Throat Home Remedies
Martin’s holistic strep throat treatment consisted of the following ingredients which he consumed at a rate of ½ teaspoon every 30 minutes to an hour.
- Use a mortar & pestle to mash up 3 cloves of fresh garlic (sources). If the raw garlic is too hot for you or you’re concerned about the odor potential, use homemade pickled garlic instead. Do not use commercial pickled garlic as it has no therapeutic value.
- Mix in half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper (sources).
- Mix in raw honey (manuka honey is the most potent. Be wary what brand you buy as most manuka honey is fake. Get UMF certified 15+) to taste which has healing properties of its own (sources).
Martin also gargled with raw apple cider vinegar diluted with some water 3x per day (sources). Although Martin didn’t use it, adding small cups of bone broth to the regimen would have helped speed healing as well.
Note that some people like to gargle with colloidal silver, which also works well. However, note that this remedy will kill the good bacteria in your throat area as well as the bad, potentially contributing to more problems down the road from unbalanced mouth, throat, and sinuses flora.
Below is Martin’s daily journal logging his progress to a cure.
Using Home Remedies for Strep Throat: A Daily Journal
10/6 – Sunday afternoon – felt “something” in throat. Still sang well at rehearsal.
10/7 – Monday morning – “something” became more prominent and I began the research into what I felt was inevitably the strep bacteria attacking my throat.
10/7 – Monday early afternoon – visit to doctor for regular checkup and asking about an unrelated pulled muscle. He checked my throat (routinely) and said nothing. It didn’t matter if he had, I would have just went through the motions of accepting an antibiotic prescription, but not taking it – I had already made up my mind to do something “different”.
10/7 – Monday afternoon – found information on The Healthy Home Economist about beating strep with no meds. Followed up with a phone call to David Aaron Katz. Became convinced that I will muscle through it with home remedies. As per David’s suggestion, I started by sucking/chewing on cloves of garlic – 5 of them before the day was out!
10/7 – Monday evening – attempted to sing. Did not go well, highs were very strained.
10/8 – Tuesday morning – throat uncomfortableness, but quick mirror check didn’t seem to reveal anything overly red. Driving son to school is when I looked in rear view mirror and noticed two white spots. Strep confirmed.
10/8 – Tuesday later morning – started a cycle of garlic chewing with a mixture of raw honey & cayenne pepper every half hour (concoction detailed below). First two administers I experienced upset stomach, but became very tired and slept most afternoon.
10/8 – Tuesday afternoon – continued garlic/honey/cayenne mixture every half hour during awake times.
10/8 – Tuesday early evening. Headaches persisted, but still had an appetite. Gargled with ACV – that was a bit painful.
10/8 – Tuesday evening. Continued with mixture until I went to sleep. Noticed a third spot very far back and lower behind the tongue. May have always been there, but this is the first I noticed.
10/9 – Wednesday early morning – Awoke with a sore throat, a bit difficult to swallow. Gargled and drank 16 fl oz water with 2 tbs of ACV & Raw Honey. Checked throat under light, saw the same three spots.
10/9 – Wednesday afternoon – no stomach issues, and the sore throat lessened considerably throughout the day. Still uncomfortable, but I can definitely eat.
10/9 – Wednesday early evening – third spot undetected, second one lessening. First one still prominent, but definitely all good signs. Also, I noticed I am not all that drained and exhausted – which I attributed to the garlic intake.
10/10 – Thursday early morning – woke up with slightly less of a sore throat. Gargled and drank 16oz water with ACV & Honey. Throat under light still shows the one stubborn spot, hard to tell, but it could be a tiny bit less in size.
10/11 – Thursday afternoon – Was told by my wife that she can’t bear with my garlic breath another day… no worries, that third spot is definitely reduced in size. I decided that come morning, I will just do Apple Cider Vinegar. Besides, I had a karaoke gig this night and needed to not smell like garlic for the customers.
10/12 – Friday Morning – Spot free. Wow. Not a single spot, throat back to normal. I decided to slowly warm up the voice as I had a singing engagement to prepare for on Saturday.
10/13 – Saturday evening – voice 100%. Throat clean as a whistle. In all my years (year after year) getting strep throat, I have NEVER bounced back this quick – not to mention getting through it without antibiotics.
10/15 – UPDATE: I made a facebook post about this a few days ago, simply saying that I kicked strep to the curb without the use of antibiotics. I have over 1400 followers on my profile, so I certainly expected varying comments. One particular comment jumped out at me… “make sure you really got rid of it, it typically comes back within a couple days if you didn’t eradicate it”.
Well……… it’s not back!
Congratulations Martin on the amazing success of your strep throat remedy! Please keep us updated on your progress, but my bet is that you won’t ever be taking antibiotics for strep throat again, and you may very well never even have it again!
Have you always wondered how to get rid of strep throat without meds? Have you ever muscled through it under your own power using one or more strep throat home remedies? If so, what remedies did you use and have you experienced immunity to strep throat since? Please chime in with the strep throat cures which worked for you below.
Want to connect with Martin? These links below will point you in the right direction:
(youtube) www.youtube.com/martindebourge
(bio) www.15hifi.com/site/martindebourge
More Information
Remedy for Sore Throat (fast acting)
How to Repair Your Gut After Antibiotics
Why Antibiotics Today Could Threaten Your Life Tomorrow
Best Natural Antibiotics and How to Use Them
Fever Blisters Home Remedy
My 15yo son came down with strep in January, right after having chicken pox! Poor guy. He got chicken pox from his dad, who came down with shingles the previous week. Anyway… I treated my husband’s eye (where the shingles manifested) with colloidal silver drops and he went to see an eye doctor, who confirmed that it was shingles.
My son’s chicken pox were treated with homeopathic rhus tox, quarts of immune boosting tea (echinacea roots and tops, eleuthero, elderberry, nettle, rosehip and peppermint), high doses of vitamin C and epsom salt baths. He missed two weeks of school and was really looking forward to getting back to school! Friday he started complaining of a sore throat and fever but seemed to be ok Saturday morning so went on the ski bus for a day of snowboarding. He said he had a great day but by the time he got back home Saturday evening he was feeling pretty crappy. I started giving him vitamin C, tea, honey and tried to get him to gargle with salt water but the taste made him gag. By Sunday he was pretty sick. I remembered colloidal silver so started him gargling with, and then swallowing, about 3/4oz. Monday I took him in to get checked because he was so miserable, he could barely talk or swallow and said it was getting hard to breathe. Rapid test was negative for strep, cultures for flu and strep were sent off to the lab, we were given a prescription for abx and I asked for a steroid shot. (not something I’d normally ask for) We went home with the Rx for abx awaiting results the next day. He also got a Rx for steroids which I had filled and he started those immediately. He continued the colloidal silver gargle/swallow routine and tea with honey, juice, chicken broth with garlic, turmeric and birdseye pepper and vitamin C. By the time the lab results FINALLY came back (two days late) on Thursday, strep positive/flu negative, he was feeling so much better I told the doctor’s medical assistant I was not going to fill the abx Rx. She confirmed with doc who said that would be fine. The strep he had was group B, not associated with complications. The following Monday I took him back in because his ears were still feeling plugged and he said it was hard to hear. Our PA said it was nice to see him because he looked so good, after he had looked SO bad when she had seen him last, and they rarely get to see patients after recovery! Exam revealed no swelling or infection in the ear so we let it ride itself out and in a couple more days he was back to 100%. I have great expectations that he will have a much higher immunity to strep in the future.
If only there had been a way to stop him from getting chicken pox an missing those 2 weeks of school. Like, maybe if he had been exposed to the antigens in a non – infectious form at some point before and allowed his body to form immunity to it without having to get sick.
I had chicken pox as a child and my parents didn'[t treat it with ANYthing – homeopathic or conventional. I got oatmeal baths and calomine lotion. I was sick for a week – like every other kid in school in the 80s and early 90s. Not 2. My biggest complaint was that I got sick over Easter vacation and missed not ONE day of school :-/ what a waste!
I’d take chicken pox, personally. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/161/10/929.abstract Only wild chicken pox confers these properties, unfortunately. Oh, here’s one more for that, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21792750
This worked for me!
Ended up with T1 Diabetes after waiting too long to take antibiotics in 1959.
Listen, Marylebone diabetes is a auto immune disease, not a product of a bacteria or virus. It’s an effect of bad nutrition and genetics.
Type 2 diabetes are caused by nutrition….Type 1 is not. But I do agree that it
could not be caused by strep.
I tried natural remedies on my twins.it didn’t work but they don’t get it anymore.Strep is very dangerous I have two friends with rheumatic fever they are in their forties.The doctors are also finding people who don’t treat strep are getting PANDAS.So I say do what you want at your own risk.My friends with rheumatic fever don’t know how or when it went to their heart but most likely from not treating.A damaged heart or a little yeast?
When I was a kid, the local doctor would “paint” the back of your throat with iodine if you got strep. I don’t remember ever having strep, but lots of my friends did, and nobody seemed to be sick for very long. Has anyone else heard of this treatment?
I was born in 1936 and grew up in a small southern West Virginia town, and the standard treatment then for strep throat was to paint it with iodine. I recall being treated once or twice like that as a preteen, and other than having a bitter taste in my mouth for a few hours, I didn’t mind it.
I am cautious about vaccine and antibiotic overuse. That said, a dear friend had untreated strep as a child (and otherwise healthy), now she has chronic fatigue and heart problems. It’s hard to watch her, knowing it could have been avoided.
I’m curious what makes her think her Chronic Fatigue and heart problems are caused by untreated strep as a child. I would also have to guess it would be hard to watch even if you didn’t think it could have been avoided. I know it’s hard to live with and knowing it could have been avoided or not the day to day living with any chronic illness, especially one that robs you of energy, is the same struggle.
Perhaps the person knows they had Rheumatic Fever, which can cause heart damage. Rheumatic Fever is an autoimmune system reaction where your body´s antibodies to attack Strep, attack your own muscle tissue (including the heart), while attacking the Strep bacteria. It occurs to some people with genetic susceptibility when Strep infections are not successfully treated or are incompletely treated or are not treated at all.
PANDAS is similar, but your body´s anti-Strep antibodies cross the blood-brain barrior and attac
I’m not anti abx but I remember an older doc telling me that ear infections used to be an acute rather than chronic illness before the advent of abx. I have never had to give either of the kids abx yet. sage tea is our go to for sore throats. Acupuncture and rest. So far so good and they are teen and tween now!
I think this is great information to have for a grid-down situation (or some other such disaster). And, not everyone is blessed to have a body that likes some meds.
My mom was allergic to penicillin based antibiotics. I have a child that is. That wipes out an entire category of antibiotics for them. For us, we found that out with one of our children when he could not shake a UTI – and to try to get rid of it, they gave him a penicillin based med. Nice rash we ended up with from it. But, ultimately, it was not and of the 3 meds they gave him that cured it. D-Mannose was what did the trick and he has not had a problem since. And it was the Ped. Urologist that approved the D-Mannose when we asked about it.
So, anti-biotics are great and have their place in medicine, but we are quickly approaching a point where things are becoming resistant to the old-school antibiotics. Remember – they have really only been in use since the 1940’s and less than 75 years later, we have resistant strains out there!
Handfuls of ibuprofen every 6 hours. ..it went away on its own by the time my doctor mailed me my results of a positive strep test. I had initially tested negative with the quick strep.. it was torture but it did go away on its own
I also use natural remedies for a sore throat… My mother used to make her own ointment when we were children with honey and garlic and other natural ingredients. For STREP (as in, you were tested and tested positive), I cannot imagine refusing antibiotics.