The use of antibiotics is an emerging subject with much controversy surrounding it. On one hand there are very many educated people that use antibiotics regularly and advocate for their use when used appropriately. On the other hand, there are very many educated individuals that advocate for antibiotic use only when absolutely necessary. Based on my knowledge of antibiotics and my experience, I stand somewhere in the middle.
I believe that the use of antibiotics in the medical field today is quite the problem. However, this is due to no fault of most doctors, as I trust that their education would guide them to make the most informed choices a majority of the time. Of course, there may be some doctors that choose to take the easy way out in terms of treatment, and antibiotics are amazingly effective in what they do. But providing antibiotics when some other treatment would suffice is an unnecessary risk that should be avoided.
Regarding my statement “to no fault of most doctors”, I mean that even if doctors were to only provide antibiotics when antibiotics are absolutely necessary, the problem of patient compliance presents new risks. Because doctors cannot force patients to complete their cycles of antibiotics, some patients will inevitable miss a dose, or several. To my knowledge, this is where the problems tend to arise. I remember seeing one study that showed how well bacteria survived under conditions in which antibiotics were present. The gist of it was that in high antibiotic environments, no bacteria would survive. However, if a bacterium were presented with a low antibiotic environment, over time it would proliferate and create a community with antibiotic resistance. It was found that after some resistance was incurred, some of these bacteria from this community could survive in high antibiotic environments, even when no bacteria from the original community could.
This is essentially the problem with patients not taking their antibiotics regularly, as they allow resistant bacteria the chance to form. Additionally, some patients think that they should stop their course of antibiotics as soon as the problem the antibiotics were intended to treat has gone away. This is a popular misconception that again lends to the generation of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
