Does your body become immune to antibiotics?

This is a question I hear daily in my office.  The answer is- sort of.  Your body does not become immune to the antibiotic but what does happen is that the bacteria in your body can ve selected to be antibiotic resistent.

Think of it this way:  Imagine you have a yard filled with rats.  Imagine that one out of 10 rats will not be killed by a particular rat poison.  Imagine also that the children of these 1 out of 10 rats  will also be immune to the poison.  Imagine now that you leave rat poison in your yard every day for a year.  Finally imagine that your house gets invaded after a year by several rats.  If you try to use rat poison to kill the rats the poison will have no effect.

Let's look at a different scenario.  Imagine that you still have 1 out of 10 rats immune to your poison and the offspring of these surviving rats will also be immune to rat poison.  Imagine now that your house if infested with fatal disease carrying rats.  What do you do?  You lay down rat poison, of course.  You take the chance that you may select for resistent rats because what other choice do you have.

This is how physicians think about antibiotics.  We certainly hope that we don't have to use antibiotics but when the risks of the disease outweigh the risks of the aintibiotics and the risks of future resistance we do what we have to in order to protect our patients and preserve the life of our patients.

I hope that this helps.

Till next time.