I’ve heard many times that we shouldn’t use antibiotics when not necessary because it could lead to bacteria developing resistance towards the drugs.
Couldn’t we simply counter this resistance with another drug?
In: 2
We run out of drugs before nature runs out of adaptations. Producing a single variant population of bacteria resistant to a single antibiotic is a very bad thing. “Training” them to become resistant to additional drugs is even worse.
Even more important than not using antibiotics when they aren’t necessary is continuing to use the *full course* of antibiotic treatment even when it seems unnecessary. Resistance isn’t just an all-or-nothing thing, and whichever bacteria are last to be destroyed are probably going to be more resistant than those which were the first to “respond” to the treatment. So by abandoning the course of treatment because enough bacteria have been eradicated the condition seems to be “cured”, there is a good likelihood that you’ve simply ‘cleared the field’ for whichever bacteria aren’t as quickly destroyed by that antibiotic, which can then spread and produce more “partially resistent” bacteria. Do this a couple times, and “natural selection” has evolved a strain that is nearly impervious.
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