PROBIOTICS containing 鈥済ood bacteria鈥� do not help prevent thrush after a course of antibiotics.
Antibiotics disrupt the natural balance of flora in the gut and vagina, which can result in upset stomachs and the fungal infection vaginal thrush. The idea of taking probiotics is to maintain or re-establish populations of harmless bugs, preventing nasty ones from getting out of control.
While there is good evidence that probiotics help prevent diarrhoea during antibiotic treatment, no rigorous studies have looked at their effect on thrush. Despite this they are a popular treatment, recommended by many doctors. The low-tech approach is to apply live yogurt containing Lactobacillus bacteria directly, but there are also various commercial preparations.
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Marie Pirotta鈥檚 team at the University of Melbourne, Australia, gave pessaries or pills, or both, to 235 women taking antibiotics and monitored them for thrush. Neither the volunteers nor researchers knew who got Lactobacillus and who got the placebos until after the study. The results were so clear-cut that the trial was ended early: none of the treatments made any difference at all (British Medical Journal, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.38210.494977.DE).