Antibiotics are medicines, we take them when we are sick, everything clear up to this point. What they are great at, is killing the bacteria that cause our diseases. Mind that not all the infections that we catch are caused by bacteria. The flu, that we catch every winter, or the cough that we experience sometimes, or even the most common forms of bronchitis are actually caused by viruses. In these cases, it is useless to take antibiotics, as they cannot kill viruses, they will not make you feel better.
Let’s find out how antibiotics work.
Antibiotics are molecules that make bacteria’s lives a living hell, impeding them to breathe, move or grow. Ultimately, bacteria cannot take it anymore and die. This is when we start to recover from a disease and feel better. Unfortunately, antibiotics can also damage some of our cells, like for instance cells of the stomach wall. This is why, while taking antibiotics to cure an infectious disease, we can experience stomach pain or nausea, and it is also the reason for taking antibiotic with full stomach, so the toxic effect is mitigated by the food.
Before antibiotics were discovered, several diseases like meningitis, pneumonia, urinary tract infections and so on, did not have a cure, so people that were affected would die. For this we owe a big applause to the researches that discover them!!!!!
We have to be careful to use antibiotics only when it is strictly necessary. Why is that? Well, bacteria are not stupid!
Imagine that you are trying to enter your house through the front door, if you find it closed (and let’s assume you do not have the key), you will try the back door. If the back door also does not work, then you will try the window.
The same happens with bacteria, if we give them an antibiotic that does not let them breathe or move the way they are used to, most of them will die, but some of them will learn how to breathe or move differently, and these super bacteria will keep growing even with our antibiotic. This is called antibiotic-resistance and it dangerous because it creates bacteria that are stronger than the normal ones and cannot be killed by the antibodies we have. Antibiotic-resistances mainly occur when antibiotics are overused, so let’s not overuse antibiotics!
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