01/07/2024
🦠*Antibiotics*🦠
Some people think that a sick child equals antibiotics. Parents place a large amount of pressure on doctors to prescribe antibiotics to their children, against their better judgment. Parents often say: “The doctor is useless; he did not even prescribe antibiotics.”
🦠Are all bacteria harmful? 🦠
Every day, we come into contact with thousands of bacteria. We are colonised by many different types of bacteria living on and inside us. To stay healthy, we need to maintain a healthy ecosystem of bacteria, called normal flora (not all bacteria are harmful!), while selectively eliminating the harmful bacteria that can cause infections.
Some bacteria cause illness when they wander from their usual location (e.g. intestines) and try to live in a new location (e.g. bladder), which is what happens when you develop a urinary tract infection (UTI).
The body’s immune system responds to an infection by fighting and destroying the invading bacteria.
🦠So what are antibiotics?🦠
Before bacteria can multiply and cause symptoms, the immune system can typically kill them. White blood cells attack harmful bacteria; even if symptoms do occur, the immune system can usually cope and fight off the infection.
Sometimes, however, the number of harmful bacteria is excessive, and the immune system cannot fight them all. To help the immune system, we sometimes use antibiotics, which are medicines that act on the bacterial cell and interfere with its ability to survive and multiply. If the bacteria are susceptible to the antibiotic, they will stop growing or die.
Antibiotics don’t affect viruses, fungi, or parasites. They only bind to and affect bacterial cells.
🦠What happens when you take antibiotics?🦠
Every time you take an antibiotic, it affects all the susceptible bacteria in your body, including those that help you digest food or protect you from infections. That's why many antibiotics have diarrhoea as a common side effect: the antibiotic kills many of your normal intestine bacteria (flora). The good bacteria in your body will usually return on their own after a while.
🦠When are antibiotics necessary?🦠
If you are usually healthy, your immune system will take care of most respiratory tract infections – both viral and some bacterial infections – on its own.
However, antibiotics are more likely to be needed for people with serious infections, other health conditions, or generally poor health.
Most respiratory and other infections start as viral but then end up as a bacterial infection. A secondary infection is an infection that occurs during or after treatment for another infection. It may be caused by the first treatment or by changes in the immune system. Therefore, you will find that infections that last unusually long(7-10 days) and don’t become better by themselves need antibiotics.
🦠How to take antibiotics?🦠
If antibiotics are prescribed, you must follow your doctor’s advice on when, how, and for how long to take them.
Complete the whole course of medication to prevent the return of the infection. Stopping the medication before the course has finished increases the risk that the bacteria will become resistant to future treatments. The ones that survive will have been exposed to the antibiotic and may consequently develop resistance to it. You need to complete the course of antibiotic treatment even after you see an improvement in symptoms.
🦠So, why do you not need antibiotics?🦠
⚖️ Antibiotics do not treat viral infections. The common cold and influenza are viral infections. Antibiotics are designed to treat illnesses caused by bacteria.
⚖️ Your immune system can usually handle things on its own. Upon being infected with bacteria your body has never seen, your immune system fights the bacteria. The first time your body encounters a new strain of bacteria, it takes some time to mount this immune response. But when the bacteria is eradicated, the body “remembers” the composition of the bacteria. So, the next time your body encounters the same bacteria, it will be able to mount an immune response much quicker and more effectively to stop the bacteria in its tracks.
⚖️ Over- and misuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics that are given for an infection not caused by bacteria or antibiotics that aren’t specific to a certain bacteria can contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in that individual. Every time you expose bacteria in your body to antibiotics, the susceptible type of bacteria are killed, but any antibiotic-resistant ones are spared. These bacteria are then capable of reproducing a new population of bacteria that are resistant to that antibiotic. This might mean that if your child has a severe infection, such as pneumonia, antibiotics may not work as well in the future.
⚖️ Antibiotics are far more useful when we use the right ones. If you were on a course of antibiotics and you did not improve, the bacteria needs to be identified. To determine the cause of an infection, it’s essential to collect a sample from the sick person and send it to the medical lab for identification. Without a culture of the infection, your doctor can’t know which organism is causing the symptoms and which antibiotics will work. Doctors used broad-spectrum antibiotics to treat infections in the past, and most people got better. Recently, it has been discovered that this practice has led to the development of superbugs.
⚖️Antibiotics have nasty side effects. Though the common side effects of antibiotics are mostly just a nuisance, some side effects can be pretty dangerous. Diarrhoea, nausea, and vomiting are common. Perhaps the most severe side effect is allergic reactions. These reactions can range from hypersensitivity (itching and redness) to a more severe anaphylactic reaction (throat and tongue swelling) that can lead to death.
⚖️ Antibiotics can interact with other medications you are taking and cause potentially serious consequences. Your doctor will consider your other medications before prescribing an antibiotic.
Antibiotics can be life-saving, but avoiding them seems to be the best thing you can do for yourself and the future. They definitely have a place in treating infections, but we have to recognise that antibiotics are overly prescribed.
Photo by Kendal James on Unsplash
