I think my illness is pretty easily and obviously traced back to dental work. I started felling ill about 2 weeks after. I had non-acute endocarditis. I have had mono and that's what it felt like...as a matter of fact thats what I thought it was and the drs. sure didn't have a clue. So I just felt like crap for 4 months.
Some of the best advice I got here was rinsing with listerine before and after brushing. No clue if it keeps me well but terrible mouth ulcers have plagued me forever and they completely disappeared. My teeth and gums look great also. So I am a believer in that either way lol.
My dentist stays with the antibiotic myth. I go along but I think there is pretty good data out there it probably does not mean much.
Listerine is great, but "the antibiotic myth" turns out to be TRUE! And Amoxicyllin turns out to be pretty benign, too. I think you can find links to two good studies on my long thread that I've been treating as a personal timeline.
A few years ago I was on the verge of quitting the Amoxicyllin pre-med before oral cleaning, which I get at my dentist and my periodontist. The evidence for benefits seemed very weak, and every month seems to bring more evidence (or press) about the importance of our gut flora "biome" for our wellbeing, so why am I wiping out mine ~3x/year for maybe no benefit, right?
I'm an MIT graduate, so I know how to read research results, so I started Googling before giving up the Amoxicyllin. Results here from memory:
First result: maybe a decade ago, the UK responded to the weak evidence by changing their guidelines for antibiotic pre-med for heart patients. They went much farther than the AMA & ACA (& Canadian counterparts) and they stopped recommending the pre-med for ALL of us.
At first, that encouraged me to proceed. But a few years had passed since that change - and I read that the UK had experienced a significant increase in endocarditis incidence and mortality among the affected population! AFAIK, they have changed their guidelines again, and now agree with the North American guidelines.
So the "myth" seems to be true!
But even if there is a significant benefit, is it big enough to justify wiping out my gut flora - maybe even continuously, if the effects last for a few months (from one oral cleaning to the next)?
Then I found the second study: a multi-center RCT that monitored gut flora in a bunch of patients who took maybe 4 different antibiotics. One was Amoxicyllin, one was Cipro, and there were 2 others. Gut flora were analyzed in detail before the antibiotics and at several intervals afterwards, up to a year (or two?) later.
Some of the results were scary - Cipro takers still had flora effects a year later!
But Amoxicyllin takers returned to "pre-pre-med" flora readings very quickly. Significant rebound in a day and essentially total recovery in a week!
There was one metric that didn't show complete recovery: all the patients' gut bacteria showed higher proportions of antibiotic-resistant variants than before, and compared to other "control" subjects who didn't take the antibiotics. (I think that effect is unavoidable: if you kill all the susceptible bacteria, the survivors and their progeny will be less susceptible.)
I tolerate Amoxicyllin fine, and its results were the best in this study, and almost totally benign and temporary. So I abandoned my plan to stop my pre-med and I shared my journey on my "timeline". And now I'm pretty happily pre-medicating with Amoxicyllin ~3x/yr before I get my teeth scraped.
Anybody, if you want the links and can't find my old post, let me know and I'll post a link to it.
And more:
1) I haven't continued to research this, so it's possible that there is newer information. (Always!)
2) I was already avoiding the Cipro family of antibiotics for other reasons - it is implicated in tendon ruptures and I've already ruptured both of my Achilles tendons and a finger tendon (all while playing competitive volleyball). But they were also the worst in the gut flora study, so I'll keep avoiding them unless/until I get an infection that doesn't respond to anything else.