Antibiotics for colds: is it worth it?

The common cold is an extremely unpleasant and inconvenient phenomenon: at seemingly trifling disease, it proceeds painfully and painfully, interferes with our plans, forcing them to spend several days, or even weeks, at home in bed instead of leading an active lifestyle. All this makes it quite understandable to wish to get rid of it as soon as possible, but not all means are good in this fight.

A cold is a viral disease, and viruses,as you know, almost invincible, and treatment for colds can only be symptomatic. This means that you need to cure only a cough and runny nose - they just give in to therapy. Even the temperature should be knocked down only as a last resort, as this is our main weapon in the fight against infection. It is also necessary to strengthen the immune system with vitamins and food as such, no matter how small the desire to take it, and actively replenish the amount of fluid in the body, as during the illness huge amounts of it are consumed.

Nevertheless, very few people are deterred from temptationtake antibiotics for colds, and this is not only not useful, but also harmful. Antibiotics are simply useless in the fight against viruses - they act only on bacterial infections, that is appropriate in inflammatory processes or for the prevention of inflammation, for example, in the pre- and postoperative period. The appointment of antibiotics for colds by a doctor is virtually impossible: on the contrary, most literate specialists actively propagandize their non-consumption without special need. In many countries, there are special state programs aimed at convincing citizens not to use antibiotics for colds, especially for the treatment of children. In addition to pathogenic microflora, antibiotics also affect beneficial bacteria, which in many respects are responsible for the state of immunity, and, in addition to dysbiosis, a person taking antibiotics for colds risks to prolong this cold itself.

In addition, an allergy to antibiotics is quitea frequent occurrence, and if it's limited to a common rash - then, you can say, lucky, because allergies to antibiotics can be expressed in more formidable forms. Very often, the manifestation of a drug allergy becomes anaphylactic shock - a very serious condition with a possible fatal outcome.

Taking antibiotics for colds is only justifiedwhen, against its background, complications develop in the form of inflammatory processes like otitis or pneumonia. But even in this case, a doctor should prescribe antibiotics, since these are not the medicines and not those states with which it is worthwhile to behave lightly. As a rule, we choose the drugs tested by time, whose names and therapeutic effect we have long known, but this is not quite the right approach. For many years, the pathogens of the disease most likely became resistant to these drugs, and certainly more than one generation of new drugs has changed. But our natural microflora may well succumb to total destruction by "proven means" - before drugs were not designed to take care of useful microorganisms, as it is now.

So, antibiotics for colds are not oursAllies, but rather enemies. They are relevant only in the development of inflammatory processes against the background of the underlying disease. In principle, the use of antibiotics should occur only on the prescription of a doctor, but if there is no such possibility for some reason, it is better to choose modern medicines that take care of the natural microflora of the body, but they are, of course, very expensive. In the case of the use of old drugs, it is necessary in parallel to prevent the dysbacteriosis and take bacterial preparations.