This is asking the wrong question: for example, there are antibiotics you are prescribed for IBS because generally they tend to have a balancing effect on the gut microbiome. I've done a course every year or two when things get unmanageable, since it's a good reset.
In this context, a treatment which reduced risk would likely be a combination of antibiotics and probiotics to try and shift the biome to a different one.
This is antibiotic marketing bs. There are antibiotic that harm pathogenic or prone-to-overgrowth bacteria harder than others, but they ALL lead to a state of dysbiosis and susceptibility to subsequent colonization/overgrowth/dysregulation
And this is the exact reason whymost of the time, GI problems come back or are replaced with different symptoms after antibiotics, and why we need more Fecal Microbiota Transplant research.
No, it isn't. The whole point of antibiotics for IBS treatment is that you already have an overgrowth, and you want to disrupt that and level the playing field.
This is literally the reason I've been on short course antibiotics (<1 week or a single 4 tab dose) at different points, because it eliminates the constant bloating and gives probiotics a chance to work.
The exact reason why overgrowth happens is because an opportunistic strain takes advantage of a dysbiotic state - even if you suppress it with antibiotics, your gut still lacks the robustness of composition necessary to be resilient. In fact, no antibiotic is selective enough to not impoverish your microbiome.
Probiotics might help, but a few or a few dozen non-gut-sourced strains simply cannot compare to the hundreds present in healthy stool. The effects on microbiota-dependent conditions are often weak to none.
tl;dr: Long-term harm that might happen to kill off whatever's harming you in the process, but don't count on it.
Long version: It depends on specific antibiotic- generally, they wipe a portion of the strains completely, suppress most of the rest, and give anything resistant the opportunity to grow out of control, a state which persists for weeks to months during which you're extra susceptible to external pathogens, food poisoning, etc. A healthy microbiome is resilient, and sadly if you don't have one, FMT is the only way to do it.
