When the sneezing, coughing, aches, and pains of the common cold get to be too much, many people beg their doctor for an antibiotic. If they feel sick enough to drag themselves to the doctor's office, an antibiotic seems necessary to help them beat this bug. But insisting on an antibiotic could actually be harmful to their health.
Unfortunately, an antibiotic simply isn’t effective as a common cold treatment — and antibiotic overuse can cause some serious problems worldwide.
Why Antibiotics Don't Work Against a Cold
The answer is simple: An antibiotic is only effective against bacteria. The common cold isn't a bacterial infection.
"Colds and flus are caused by viruses, not by bacteria," says Kathryn Teng, MD, a physician in the department of internal medicine and director of clinical integration of personalized health care at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
"Viruses are a completely different type of organism," adds Dr. Teng. "We don't have good medicines to fight viral infections." There are no antiviral drugs used to treat the common cold.
And your body will heal on its own without any treatment at all. "Your body can get rid of that and you will do just fine without taking an antibiotic," explains Teng.
How Taking an Antibiotic Can Hurt
There are also side effects and risks of taking antibiotics, Teng says. Some people may experience diarrhea from antibiotic use. Taking an antibiotic can affect different parts of the body. In women, they can increase the risk of developing a yeast infection, says Teng.
And there's certainly concern about the harmful effects of antibiotic overuse and antibiotic resistance.
What Antibiotic Resistance Means to You
Many kinds of bacteria live on and within the body without making a person sick. When antibiotics are given for a cold or flu virus, the virus will not be killed — but some of these normal bacteria will be. After repeated exposures to antibiotics, these bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. So when your body is exposed to an antibiotic repeatedly from antibiotic overuse, the bacteria in your body learn how to combat it and make the antibiotic ineffective.
If you pick up a bacterial infection from someone else who has been infected by an antibiotic-resistant strain, you too will now have an infection that may not respond to antibiotics. Without powerful antibiotics to destroy these bacteria, your health is at serious risk — and life-threatening complications may result.
Here's some more food for thought: If you're sick with a bacterial infection and the standard first line of defense antibiotics (which tend to be cheap) don't work, your doctor has to move on to second- and third-line drugs. These antibiotics can be much more expensive — some even 100 times the price of first-line medications.
And doctors are running out of options to tackle resistant bacterial infections.
"Although we have a lot of antibiotics compared to 50 years ago, we are not developing antibiotics at the same rate we used to," says Teng. "Today there are definitely situations where people are developing bacterial infections that we don't have effective antibiotics for."
Approximately half of all antibiotic prescriptions administered outside of the hospital are prescribed for viral infections, making them unnecessary. But antibiotic resistance can also develop from taking antibiotics (when properly prescribed for a bacterial infection) incorrectly — such as not taking the entire prescription. In that case, the weakest bacteria will have already been killed. But a few of the strongest bacteria may still be lurking in your body when you decide to skip the last few doses of your antibiotic. Those remaining bacteria may stick around and become antibiotic-resistant.
Educating yourself about when antibiotics are appropriate to use — and when they're not — can help you protect yourself, your family, and people across the globe from the threat of antibiotic resistance from antibiotic overuse.