My doctor recently prescribed me antibiotics, which I am paranoid about as I have taken a lot recently. Is taking a lot of antibiotics bad for me personally, like I will be less able to fight infection with antibiotics later on?
Or, is it almost like pollution, where people as a whole are just using too much of it for it to be sustainable?
Other way of saying it I guess: Is 5 people taking 1 unnecessary antibiotic each a year the same as 1 person taking 5 unncessary antibiotics a year?
In: 6
>Is taking a lot of antibiotics bad for me personally, like I will be less able to fight infection with antibiotics later on?
>Or, is it almost like pollution, where people as a whole are just using too much of it for it to be sustainable?
Bit of both. The core problem of antibiotic *misuse* is that it drives the emergence of resistant bacteria. Using a lot of antibiotics in one person is not necessarily misuse.
Consider it this way. Antibiotics are substances that are toxic to (particular) bacteria but not to humans. By taking them, you are creating a hostile environment that will kill the bacteria in a matter of days. However, all bacteria are not created equal. As with humans in a brutally tough survival scenario, some will live longer than others but eventually even the most resilient of them will probably die.
This is the point of finishing a full course of antibiotics; ensuring you take the necessary time to kill off even the most resilient of the bunch. If you do this properly, there should be no survivors afterwards, and there is no major issue even if it has to happen several times in a relatively short timespan.
On the other hand, *not* finishing a course of antibiotics, or taking a low enough dose that it doesn’t kill all bacteria, means you’re leaving the most resilient bacteria to survive and regrow their numbers. That’s bad. If you do that several times with different antibiotics, it’s *very* bad, because you’ll eventually run out of options and just die to untreatable infection.
But typically that doomsday scenario doesn’t happen in a single person, because between at least partial effect of your current antibiotic and your immune system mopping up the stragglers, you will probably clear the infection and be fine. But before you’re fully rid of them, you can pass them on to someone else and the problem continues in that person, a little worse every time, because bacteria can also exchange resistance factors with other bacteria they mingle with in every host.
So:
>Other way of saying it I guess: Is 5 people taking 1 unnecessary antibiotic each a year the same as 1 person taking 5 unncessary antibiotics a year?
5 people using 1 antibiotic in an irresponsible manner is probably worse by virtue of giving more opportunity for that resistance factor exchange, but it’s bad either way.
*Am immunology PhD, but not particularly an infectious disease specialist.*
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