US Medical Supplies Blog

This has been a particularly nasty winter, and it seems everyone I know has contracted a serious case of flu or bronchitis over the past several months. Personally, I had a nasty fever last week and I’m glad to be over it. I worked through it the old-fashioned way: by staying in bed and trying to rest. Others like to go see the doctor to ask for a prescription. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but here are a few words of caution. If you use antibiotics too often, your body will build up a resistance to the effects of the drug. This can lead to even greater problems.

For one thing, antibiotic medicine kills many types of bacteria in your body – even “good” bacteria. Your body relies on bacteria in your stomach and intestinal tract to break down foods. Without these bacteria, you could have an ugly case of diarrhea to deal with. Also, using antibiotics increases the likelihood of developing a yeast infection of the throat.

The main reason to be careful in your use of antibiotic medicine is because your body will build up a resistance to it. Over the years, several dangerous diseases have surfaced that are resistant to ordinary medicine. One such disease is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. MRSA is essentially a type of staph infection that is highly resistant to antibiotics. Due to a general overuse of antibiotics, MRSA is more of a problem now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. This disease occurs frequently in hospitalized seniors, but it is also affecting children (even some newborns). Doctors are hard-pressed to treat this disease, because the only medicines that will work are even-stronger forms of antibiotics. At the same time, doctors are hesitant to prescribe such strong medicine because they don’t want to take the chance that the disease will become resistant to the more powerful antibiotics.

Essentially, the use of antibiotics is kind of a Faustian bargain. You can use it to kill your harmful bacteria, which will make you feel better, but potentially at the expense of your body’s long-term resistance to other diseases.