As I sat in urgent care this morning, waiting to have a tick bite looked at, I read a poster that among other things stated that antibiotics are only effective against bacteria, not viruses.
I’ve heard this caution scores of times over the course of my life, so obviously there are a lot people who apparently believe otherwise. These people, along with their push-over doctors who give into their demands for antibiotics to treat viral illnesses, are cited as one of the reasons that we’ve now plagued drug resistant bacteria types (well, that and giving antibiotics to food animals). If this is even a partial cause, that’s a whole lot of people demanding drugs that won’t do anything for their illness.
But where did the idea that things like the common cold or viral bronchitis could be cured with antibiotics even come from? Is there a single initial source of this misinformation decades ago?
Very likely just that the “general public” doesn’t really know the difference between the two - germs are germs, after all, and just thinks of “antibiotic” as “anti-germ”.
Antibiotics were a miracle when they were introduced. Diseases like TB that were previously incurable could now be cured in days and wounds that previously led to fatal infections could now be dusted with a little sulfa and a man headed for amputation or death would live to walk again. It’s no wonder that people came to believe that there was nothing they could not treat (particularly since viruses were little-known to the public when antibiotics were introduced).
And it was once common practice for doctors to just automatically prescribe antibiotics “just in case” whenever you came in with pretty much any illness whatsoever, without testing whether your infection was bacterial or viral. I know that was the case when I was a kid in the 1980s – any time I was sick and my mom took me to the doctor, I pretty much always came home with a prescription for antibiotics. This probably helped reinforce the misconception antibiotics are anti-germ. This has fallen out of practice now that antibiotic resistant bacteria have become an issue.
I think that’s it. And because viruses are inherently self-limiting, the patients always started getting better as they were taking the antibiotics. They presumed the antibiotics worked.
Untrue, it took months of antibiotic treatment to put TB disease in remission and cure wasn’t guaranteed. It all depended on the extent/severity/location of the infection. TB forms lots of deep abscesses where oxygen and blood just don’t get to, so antibiotics often can’t reach it.
Granted, antibiotics were a boon for TB sufferers, as they had a chance at a cure, and if not that, at least prolonged remission with partial or even complete functional recovery. But there were few instant miracles.
All the general public thinks is, “Antibiotics kill the bad things in our bodies that cause disease.” Whether the bad thing is a germ or a virus is already beyond their hair-splitting. Antibiotics are the stuff you inject in your body to stop bad diseases, period, in their view.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that this should be standard practice, but back in the day you used to hear the phrase “opportunistic infection” quite a lot - as I recollect the idea was that you might have something viral, but by giving antibiotics prophylactically you could prevent things from getting worse as a result of a secondary, bacterial, infection. Is there a germ (heh heh) of sense in the idea?
I know, for example, that opportunistic infections can (could?) bea very serious thing in HIV. Is this also more broadly true of other viral infections - can they “weaken the immune system”?
It’s standard practice to put certain patients on prophylactic antibiotics, particularly HIV patients who have a low CD4 count or who have had certain manifestations of AIDS in their past. The same is true for other diseases (as noted by don’t ask). So there is certainly a role for using antibiotics preventively.
And of course, it’s not always easy to tell what the cause of a disease is. Sometimes doctors will diagnose by means of treatment. Did the antibiotic work? If yes, then I guess that it was bacterial. If no, then we’ll have to try something else.
I believe the general public is uninformed and or willfully ignorant.
Look at what people think gives you a cold or pneumonia. The real info is out there and yet my neighbors tell me I’ll get a cold from walkin barefoot in 50 degree temps (arctic weather in FL).
TB could not (and cannot) be cured in days. It’s one of the reasons there are resistant forms. The bacillus has a long reproductive cycle, so the drug has to be in one’s system a long time to prevent every generation of bacillus from having a shot at reproducing. Stop taking the meds and you’ve allowed all the stronger or longer repro-cycled bacilli to survive and multiply, making it even harder to clear them from the body.
Many doctors, faced with a patient demanding treatment for their cold/hepatitis/measles infection used to prescribe antibiotics even though they knew that they would have no effect. It happened here in the UK where the consultation was free and the prescription free or low cost, and I suspect that it was even more prevalent in countries where the patient was paying directly.
Yep. I messed up. Antibiotics produced a cure for a disease that was previously incurable (and often led to years as an invalid before death), but did not provide an instant cure.
Yes. Before wondering about the general population distinguishing bacterial from viral infections, I’d like to see how well understood the germ theory of infection is.
It’s not nonsense, since a Strep throat can often occur during a cold or flu for example. BUT the problem is that bacteria get resistant to antibiotics, and antibiotics also kill off your good gut bacteria. Both of which werent widely known until recently.
