How does medicine know where to go in the body to fight disease? For example a throat infection vs a stomach infection vs an infected cut on your foot?
In: Chemistry
Your question is generically about medicine, but I guess you meant antibiotics, so I’ll answer to that:
1. In general, medicines are absorbed by the gut and reach the bloodstream. They’re carried by the blood to every part of the body. This is how they generally reach every area that might be infected
2. Each antibiotic has a different modus operandi. Some dissolve the cell wall of the bacteria (humans, being animals, don’t have cell walls). Some would prevent the bacteria from reproducing, by disrupting certain chemical reactions that the bacteria need to replicate. Some would make it easier for our immune system to find them by binding to a protein in its cell wall.
3. Depending on their nature of action, certain antibiotics work very well in certain infections (gut infection vs upper respiratory tract infections, for instance)
4. For resistant microbial strains, we can use a combination of multiple antibiotics, or use a higher generation antibiotic which the microbe isn’t yet resistant to (cephtriaxone or ceftaroline, for instance)
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