CALIFORNIA, USA — If you're battling a long cold, you might ask your doctor for anything that can make the sickness go away. ABC10 health expert Dr. Payal Kohli said it's best to skip an antibiotic.
"We often want to reach for an antibiotic because in our head we think it might help us to recover faster, but that can actually be problematic. So, what you wanna do is you wanna treat the cause of the infection," Kohli said. "The cause could be viral, and a viral infection does not respond to antibiotics."
She said you can sometimes make an exception for the flu, but that's because it's bacterial, not viral.
"Don't be so quick to jump to ask for that antibiotic because they can actually do harm. They can wipe out the good flora or the good bacteria in your gut, so they can cause problems with diarrhea or stomach upset. They can even cause secondary infections like Clostridium difficile, which happens when somebody takes antibiotics and wipes out the good bacteria," Kohli said. "In a population level, you can actually breed antibiotic resistance, meaning if we start writing antibiotics willy nilly for people who actually have viral infections, it teaches the bacteria how to basically evade the antibiotic."
She said that puts pressure on the bacteria to change and then develop resistance. That would limit options to treat infection in the future.
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