The Guardian view on antibiotics: don ’t keep taking the tablets | Editorial

When knowledge advances, so should the advice doctors giveThe idea that we have a moral duty to complete any course of antibiotics that the doctor prescribes is intuitively comforting. Following the course to the end appears as an act of solidarity against the genuinely terrible threat of widespread antibiotic resistance, something that could make medicine as we know it impossibly dangerous. Following the doctor ’s orders allows us to be mildly uncomfortable in pursuit of collective good. So it is rather shocking when the British Medical Journal reports that the instruction is mistakenand indeed counterproductive. We should not only take antibiotics less often; we should take them for much less time.Nonetheless, theargument of the BMJ paper is very strong. It starts from history. At the beginning of the antibiotic era, the danger to patients came from insufficient dosage, not from too much. The very first patient ever treated with penicillin died after supplies ran out, even when they were recycled from what he had already consumed. Sir Alexander Fleming himself believed that antibiotic resistance would be stimulated by inadequate courses of antibiotics. In any case, there are compelling legal and social reasons why doctors are more worried about being accused of doing too little than too much.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Antibiotics Medical research MRSA and superbugs Health Society Science Farming Environment Drugs Source Type: news