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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Course & Side effect of Antibiotics

Use: As the title says it is for people who need to know how antibiotics affect your body and possible side-effects.

PS: This post is not written by a doctor but information I gathered and I am writing this post for the reason that I could not find a direct answer to what I searching for.

People take antibiotics for various infections, mostly strep throats, acne and bacterial infections. Antibiotics help kill bacteria. While there are amazing reads for how antibiotics works such as here and here. The side effects that are caused because of the antibiotics was not found easily online. And from discussion with people, I observe that each person responds differently to antibiotics. Although this post might not give you complete information, you will get some insight and reading links from here.

The Course:
The important thing to know about taking antibiotics is to complete the course. The simplest reasoning is this, bacteria's are of different levels, the high level ones which are causing the painful symptoms such as throat irritation, high temperature etc and the low level ones which may be dormant (not causing the visible irritation) but are supporting the reproduction of bacteria. When one starts to take antibiotics, within a day or two, the symptoms are reduced, and the person starts to feel better. The reason is the high level bacteria are killed from the two-day antibiotic intake. But the low-level bacteria which are slightly more resistant to a small dose of antibiotic are not killed yet. At this point, if one stops to take antibiotics, the low-level bacteria, would reproduce new bacteria with resistance to the antibiotic sample it obtains from the two-day intake. Now the DNA for the new bacteria is antibiotic resistant and when these bacteria become active and cause infection, they would not respond to the antibiotics, one takes the next time.

For more details, you can check out information from Mayo and UK Guardian.

The Side-effects:
When antibiotics are taken over a period of time, there are some painful/not-so-painful side-effects. Some of the side-effects, I am aware of, are acne, mouth-ulcers, troubled-stomach etc. This is the reason some doctors suggest one to take antibiotics with B-Complex tablets and include lots of pasteurized yogurt/curd and reduce foods that detoxify the body (such as caffeine, oils, alcohol etc) in their diet. The reason for this is the antibiotics taken to kill the infection-causing bacteria, kills some necessary bacteria that are required for the body as well. One such reasoning (that I obtained from a post) is the good bacteria called gut microflora, which is present in the stomach is responsible for breaking-down the food consumed and detoxifying the body. The antibiotics kills this bacteria, and as a result of which the body loses its capability to detoxify the body and results in the side-effects.

Overall, it is important to know the working of a medicine before one takes it so that one regulates their diet to avoid the side-effects.

Thank you for taking time to read the post. 

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