Antibiotics: Medicine’s Double-Edged Sword
“Misuse and overuse of antibiotics are now threatening to undo all their early promises and success in curing disease. But now the greatest threat is complacency… Action must start now, if we are not to return to the bad old days of incurable diseases before antibiotics were available”
-Lord Soulsby, House of Lords Select Committee on Resistance to Antibiotics, 19981.
Throughout the last half century, medicine has been transformed by a neglected revolution of bacteria resistant to the miracle drugs of our era: the antibiotics. Now, physicians worldwide are being confronted with the problem of curing patients with bacterial infections resistant to most antibiotic remedies, and resistant …ver más…

The physician who didn’t fall prey to the lure of the virtual pharmacopeia of antibiotics was the exception. In fact, at the start of the antibiotic boom it was almost impossible for doctors not jump onto the antibiotic bandwagon, because since the numerous major infectious diseases had never encountered this type of treatment, infections were rapidly annihilated in a “magical” fashion12. Indeed, in the new antibiotic era dubbed “the great mortality transition” by demographers, the diseases that had decimated populations in the pre-antibiotics era were rapidly being “defanged”13. The power of antibiotics was seen as so omnipotent that they were prescribed in the medical field even to treat colds and viral illnesses when practitioners had no concrete evidence of antibiotics inhibiting viruses14. Doctors frequently used placebo antibiotic injections just to improve patient disposition15. Fueled by blind optimism, “patients demanded antibiotics…and since doctors are not paid for advice but for procedures, and because writing a prescription is the fastet way to part with a patient, the unholiest of alliances was at work: consumer demand based on misinformation, mercantile interest, and the insecurity and cynicism of the middlemen”16.
Unfortunately, this would quickly change as bacteria learned to adapt, leaving many physicians unprepared and tarnishing the miracle of bacterial