I agree. But the key is going to be that you can't easily classify most microbes as "good" or "bad" without talking about the host factors (genetic, diet, etc).

Uropathogenic E. coli are a good example of this:

Bacterial virulence phenotypes of Escherichia coli and host susceptibility determines risk for urinary tract infections https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5653229/

One size doesn't fit all: unraveling the diversity of factors and interactions that drive E. coli urovirulence https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28217693/

We are already looking at the stomach in ways we never imagined.

Think about how powerful it is over our body. It controls mood, directs our behavior through pain, and is an amazing organ at capturing energy and nutrients from the world around us.

Many antibiotics dont actually kill gram negative/positive bacteria, they merely prevent them from reproducing. Now if you want to kill bacteria, look to Russian phages, or swallow some sea water where a 1ml sample will contain billions of phages but its pot luck if any of them are right one's you need for your bacterial infection. One other little know fact about antibiotics, is the penicillin based one's get metabolised in the liver into penicillamine which is used to reduce copper levels in the body and ironically copper also helps to kill bacteria. https://www.nature.com/articles/151107a0 Considering what Penicillamine does to the body and how it affects Vit B6, you can see why you get pain in different parts of the body when you take too much Vit B6, however its also a good way to find out where bacterial levels are high in the body, dental fillings can be a common area. Creatine gets broken down into creatinine and happens to be one of the few things that can kill both gram negative and gram positive bacteria, of course you need to consume a lot of it though, but havent worked out why we get told to not consume creatine for more than a few weeks though. Anyone know?

One downside to phages is that they replicate. Once you stop taking antibiotics, there is no risk that the treatment will replicate and potentially mutate inside of you. Otherwise, I agree.

With regards to creatinine, I'm sure you'd want to generally suppress your bacterial load if you don't have symptoms or an active infection. That could leave the door open for a worst bacteria or fungus to come along and fill the niche.

My understanding based on an expert here in the UK is that Phages only replicate as long as there is the bacteria around that they were bred to infect and replicate in. As soon as the bacteria levels drop, phages die as there is essentially no food for them to consume. Considering the timescales to develop phages for a strain of bacteria (2 weeks), the ideal treatment is antibiotics, then phages to complete the job, because even Flemming stated when he discovered Penicillin, you need to keep taking these antibiotics until the infection is gone, but today many doctors just prescribe a course for 7-14days, and then you have to go back to get another course if they will prescribe another course, at least on the NHS its like that, and thats when you can get an appointment in my experience. Also bacteria can go into dormancy developing biofilms in different parts of the body and creatinine wont work then. As the immune system attacks the food we eat bar some exceptions like starch as the only sugar not attacked, when we do a water only fast the number of immune cells drop as the numbers are not needed to attack the food. So the lower number of immune cells concentrate on attacking pathogens and faulty cells. Considering Lent used to be 40days of water only fasting, and there was no modern medicine back then, it seems observation and trial and error over thousands of years highlighted a suitable way to keep religious followers healthy, a necessary requirement for religions back then. Today science can explain why water only fasting works for so many illnesses. It seems Herbet Shelton was good at observing considering what we know about Vit D https://web.archive.org/web/20110222200902/http://www.soilan...

However, one of the reasons why his Hygienist methods ie water only fasting were not popular is because some undiagnosed health conditions caused sudden deaths when on a water only fast, so this is why water only fasting is not popular in the medical industry, but Socrates called water only fasting the physician from within, so even the ancient Greeks had made their own observations of what worked way back then with their limited toolset.

The standard advice I have seen regarding Creatine as a fitness supplement is to basically just take 5g / day. I have never seen guidance to use it for a few weeks only. Creatine helps replace things that get used up during hard workouts and supports the cellular energy cycle. It wouldn't make sense to just take it for a few weeks because it doesn't do a one-time effect.

Creatine cycling has been a thing since I started lifting more seriously, at least 15+ years ago. There was often a loading period, where you would take more, and a maintenance period, both normally given as a g/kg or mg/kg value of creatine to body weight. I believe the idea was either your body became less responsive to the increase creatine in your system of time or your stores become saturated. I'm not sure what research now shows or how seriously cycling/loading not taken these as I'm not a trainer nor a nutritionist, but it something I did when I first started lifting and that's what I remember learning about taking it.

I always thought the old advice was to cycle creatine "Just in case" and that more recent advice was that there wasn't much research backed evidence that mandated the need to cycle it

For reference: https://supplementclarity.com/do-you-need-to-cycle-creatine/

Most antibiotics prescribed for UTI are bacteriocidal. Penicillins like amoxicillin and fluoroquinolones are probably the most popular.

Fluoroquinolones due to sequelae on connective tissue and retinas are not first line treatments for UTI anymore

https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/25/antibiotic-ciprofloxacin-in...

https://www.acsh.org/news/2012/04/05/keep-eyes-open-using-ci...

https://sites.google.com/site/levaquininfo/

Important gut bacteria may have gone extinct and we did not even notice

Then it couldn’t have been that important.