My mom has Hashimoto’s which she's managed successfully for years using a low daily dosage of doxycycline. This suggests a mechanism for why that seems to work for her.
I'm asking this because I have Hashimoto's myself and none of the endocrinologists I've seen recommended anything else besides levothyroxine.
Low dose doxycycline seems who tolerated, and has an interesting side effect of reducing inflammation to near zero in the body (CRP levels of actually zero). Given the role of inflammation in heart disease, that might be helpful for longevity too.
There's actually a drug, periostat that's prescribed in this way for oral health. It's 20mg doxycycline taken daily long term. There are studies on it available online.
edit: I would love it if just one person could tell me how I'm wrong instead of downvoting. Long term low dose antibiotic treatment (doxy is a tetracycline) is how this happens. If you look up how I'm wrong before downvoting, I suspect you will end up not doing so, and perhaps learn something new.
If you have a garden and use pesticides, there are probably some weeds that will be resistant to it. But the mere existence of resistant weeds is not an argument for continued indiscriminate use of pesticides, as you will end up with even more. Degree matters.
Yes, this treatment can probably help some people, but it's probably also true that deploying this en masse would not be a great idea from a long-term ecological perspective.
Low-dose antibiotics are already widely used today in farm animals because it lets them gain weight more quickly ( = more profit for the farmer). And now the bacteria have spread out of farms and into the ER rooms and are killing people. Another form of socialized externalities.
These people have legimate medical needs for this antibiotic so this isn’t a case where we’d want to withhold it.
We’re better off spending our resources discovering new antibiotics instead of neggling who’s deserving of what.
It's generally not fatal when treated. I'm sure you know that bacteria don't have to do traditional reproduction to exchange genetic material so they can pass along traits like antibiotic resistance very rapidly. It can also spread between different species of bacteria (see plasmids, bacterial conjugation/transformation).
So this is why I'm against using antibiotics for non-life saving applications, generally. You have widely drug resistant staph (eg, MRSA), e. coli, chlamydia, tuberculosis (XDR TB), et al. causing massive problems in healthcare systems across the world and killing quite a few people.
I am not sure if you know this, but given the absence of the selection pressure, bacterial populations can lose drug resistance. It has higher ongoing metabolic requirements to have that trait, and is a evolutionary disadvantage. Also, I don't know if you appreciate the difficulty to find new antibiotics (particularly wide-spectrum and low side-effects/toxicity). I would encourage you to research that topic carefully because it's a subject with a lot of poor information written about it.
Finally, I will underscore that I took my own advice, and found multiple papers hosted by the NIH about emergence of drug resistance in patients using very low dose doxy (not in Hashimoto's, but rosacea, where its non-antibiotic properties are also useful, though I'm not sure it's the same mechanism). So I was wrong, it seems. I learned something new in the process of researching my response.
The problem is, people without medical background cannot really evaluate if a treatment recommended by random blog is worth it, in terms of possible risk-reward. This can lead to all sorts of social phenomena, of which the most visible is anti-vaccination movement.
Though, I suppose it's in the mild category. I mostly only experience lethargy, swelling in my neck, and itchy calves.