What role have doctors played in the emergence of antibiotic restistance?

Answer 1

Patients often demand antibiotics when they have colds, flus, or other viral illnesses, even though antibiotics do nothing for these conditions. When doctors give in to these demands, they contribute to antibiotic resistance.

It's important to understand how antibiotics work, and how bacteria respond to them. Each time an antibiotic is taken, bacteria respond by making adjustments in how they breed. It's much like watching a linebacker in a football game as he uses fast footwork to weave and sway to get around an opponent. As the bacteria changes how it produces, it "weaves and sways" and "goes around" the active ingredients in antibiotics. Each time a bacteria encounters that same bacteria, it now has new defenses to defeat the antibiotic. Since most antibiotics belong to "families" of antibiotics with similar properties, the defenses a bacteria creates against one antibiotic often will now defeat the entire "family" of similar antibiotics, kind of like how one football team (here a bacteria type) can defeat another football team (here a family of antibiotics).

Since we need to know one or a different antibiotic will be able to defeat a certain bacteria, we need to limit how often we take any antibiotics.