I know it’s illegal but whenever I get antibiotics from the doctor I save a few and give them to friends or coworkers who don’t have insurance so that when cold season comes they might be able to shorten their illness
That is not good- that’s not quite how antibiotics work.
Antibiotics kill some bacteria, but don’t manage to kill other bacteria. Just like when you get a particular sickness (or a vaccination), your body can protect you from future infections, any bacteria that came into contact with the antibiotic is protected from future doses of that antibiotic. Bacteria are very virulent breeders, so they spawn more resistant bacteria.
If you take the full dose of antibiotics, your natural antibodies can deal with the cells that are resistant while the medicine kills off the bacteria that isn’t resistant. If you don’t take the full course of antibiotics, then your body has to deal with both the resistant and the non-resistant strains of bacteria, and it can become overwhelming. Also, most bacteria are able to pass on genes between still-living cells, so that previously non-resistant strains become resistant, and you have inadvertently cultivated a stronger strain of bacteria.
Furthermore, colds and the flu are viral infections, so antibiotics don’t work against them anyway. The best protection against viral infections are vaccinations, as there are not many viruses that we have developed anti-viral medication against, once you already have the disease. If there are anti-viral medications, it is even more important that you take the full dose of the medication, because anti-viral medication is even harsher against the body than antibacterial medication is.
How antibiotics work
How antiviral medication works
Spread this around; antibiotics are not candy
To put it shortly: antibiotics don’t do shit for the cold. You need to take the entire bottle that is prescribed to you. People not doing that is how antibiotic resistant infections crop up. People like OP are literally why diseases like MRSA exist.
OP shouldn’t feel bad about good intentions but this is really dangerous. There’s also the risk that your friends are allergic to the specific type of antibiotics you give them.
things that a better-off person can do for their sick less-well-off friends that don’t involve breeding superbacteria through misue of antibiotics:
Buy them cold medicine
Buy them cough drops
Buy them fancy tissues with lotion
Make them too much soup to eat in one go and freeze half for later
Find them a low-cost clinic and accompany them there
Tell them you are giving them their day’s wages and they are staying home Friday/Monday and then do.
Go to their house. Wash the dishes, take out the garbage, walk the dog, scoop the cat or just plain change the whole litter box, clean the bathtub and mom voice them until they take a hot shower or steam their head.
if they have asthma or bronchitis and are out of inhaler but you have a half-full one, that is a thing you can sanitize and share.
ditto palliative prescription medication like “I have half a bottle of lidocaine gargle, you want it?” “I am bringing you the rest of my Robitussin with codeine” “here harvest some ibuprofen from my giant bottle of 1,000 ibuprofen”
I feel like some of this should have been covered in high school health class. It would do a lot to combat misuse of antibiotics. Superbacteria is really dangerous for everyone but is particularly bad for people with multiple antibiotic allergies and will lead to hospital stays for IV antibiotics of kinds they can take.
Agreed. High school health class curricula simply haven’t been set up to take into account a future in which the middle class has dissolved and a huge chunk of Americans can’t afford to go to a doctor if they get a cold. - _ -
Last year, I had caught a bad case of strep throat. I usually get it a couple of times a year because my tonsils suck, but this time it was BAD. I was taking amoxicillin like I had been before, but nothing was happening. I was still sick 2 weeks later. I told my doctor and he gave me a different antibiotic and it cleared up.
I was telling one of my friends about all of it, and he says “Oh do you need some amoxicillin? I never finished my bottle when I got strep because it went away after like 3 days”.
Like a week before I got sick, that same friend and I were out having dinner, and we shared a bit of food. This asshat gave me an amoxicillin-resistant strain of strep throat because he didn’t finish his antibiotics. I couldn’t eat anything solid and could barely drink for 2 weeks because someone thought he was “feeling better and didn’t need medicine”.
Finish your god damn antibiotics people!!!!
Yeah, i was taught this in year 3. This is just another thing you americans can add to your “why our our educational system is crap” list and its really scary how this isnt common knowledge there
Not finishing the course of antibiotics is VACCINATING THE BACTERIA.
