Dr. Amy Nett: If patients come to the clinic and they’re either pregnant or breastfeeding, I definitely have a conversation with them that I tend to be very conservative, and I really pretty much limit my treatment to diet and lifestyle modifications. There are not a lot of herbal supplements that I feel have been adequately tested in the setting of breastfeeding and nursing, and again, this is mostly because people don’t want to sign up for that sort of trial, of course. If there’s any question about whether or not something is either going to decrease your milk supply or potentially affect your baby, you just don’t even want to risk it, so we just don’t have the studies to know what’s safe and what’s not. In terms of treatment, I mostly limit it to diet and lifestyle.
Let’s say we’ve already done gut testing and then someone unexpectedly becomes pregnant, I might do something like probiotics and Lauricidin. Lauricidin is probably the one antimicrobial that we’re pretty comfortable using in pregnancy.