How can using antibiotics without doctor’s advice be dangerous?

Dr Abdul Waheed Mastoi
Many people around the world, including Pakistan, start taking medicines without consulting a doctor. For example, if someone has a headache, stomach pain or pain in any part of the body, they buy the medicine themselves from the pharmacy.
Among these drugs are the top antibiotics, which, by using them on their own, a person has no idea of ​​the harms.
Uzma Shaheen is also among those people who have been taking antibiotics for a long time without doctor’s advice.
“Whenever I had a stomach ache, I would take antibiotics and get relief, so I continued to use them for a long time,” she says.
Uzma said that one day when she was in severe pain, she used antibiotics twice in four hours.
I felt like nothing was working in my body. I spent that day in great pain.
After being in constant pain, when Uzma reached the doctor, the doctor told her that due to continuous self-administration of antibiotics, the medicine has stopped working in her body.
I was shocked to hear this because I was in so much pain that I could not even speak. The doctor told me that the antibiotic medicine they will give him now will not work quickly.
Uzma’s problem did not end there, but when she came home after staying in the hospital for four consecutive days, her body began to show side effects from the unnecessary use of antibiotics and she suffered from nausea, vomiting and loss of appetite. The problem is solved.
When I came home, I was dizzy. My appetite was completely lost due to the effect of the medicine. Besides, I was not sleeping well at night. Even after spending six months today, my stomach is under the influence of these medicines.
How many patients like Uzma do not know that too many antibiotics can harm them?
When the scribe asked a few such people whether they took antibiotics themselves or on doctor’s advice, most of them said they would self-medicate when they had a fever, sore throat or other viral infection. take medicine while the number of people who said that they do not use any medicine by themselves but take medicine based on what the doctor tells them is less.
Well, antibiotics are the most common medicine prescribed to people but it is important to understand that antibiotics do not work at all in viral flu ie cold, flu, common cough and fever.
If one has such problems, it can be due to any number of reasons such as viral infection, fungal infection, or even a hormonal reason.
So how will antibiotics work when bacteria are not responsible for the disease?
Experts say that the more antibiotics you use, the more likely bacteria are to develop ‘antimicrobial resistance’. That is, over time, they develop such changes in themselves that the drugs stop being effective on them and these bacteria are called ‘drug resistant bacteria’.
Dr. Tariq of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) told the BBC that ‘the balance in our body keeps changing, if we take antibiotics in a disease where it is not needed. In such a case, the bacteria brings changes in itself, then when an antibiotic is needed for a disease, in such a case it does not affect it at all.’