Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues by Martin J. Blaser

[gilda_elise]

Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues
by Martin J. Blaser


Tracing one scientist’s journey toward understanding the crucial importance of the microbiome, this revolutionary book will take readers to the forefront of trail-blazing research while revealing the damage that overuse of antibiotics is doing to our health: contributing to the rise of obesity, asthma, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now, this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances—antibiotics—threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences.

There have been warning about the overuse of antibiotics for years, and, other than his own unproved thesis, there's really very little new here. And of what there was, I wasn't sure what, exactly, was the author's point. How is it "bad" for H pylori to be absent from more people's systems if its presence is related to stomach cancer and ulcers? Yes, it might be more beneficial in regards to GERD and asthma, but which illnesses would most people opt for, given the choice? Stomach cancer or asthma? Ulcers or GERD? Ultimately, it seemed that the book was more about the author's war on H pylori than just about anything else.

Even when other problems are sited concerning antibiotics' overuse, much of the "proof" is circumstantial. Any certain problem may very well be caused by the overuse of antibiotics. But, then, it may not.

The book is written simply, perhaps too simply, and it could have done with better editing. And the ones (1) all being capital i's (I) was a distraction.