Antibiotics are a blessing to humankind, protecting them from fatal diseases for years now. In the past decades, since antibiotics were integrated into our healthcare system, their use escalated very quickly. They were sought to be the cure for each and every disease, so much so that even if the disease was not improving, increasing the dose or giving other broad-spectrum antibiotics seemed to be an excellent option, thus making patients think that these antibiotics were a miracle pill to save them from everything.
This wasn’t true at all. Antibiotics are drugs that interfere with bacterial growth and multiplication, and these bacteria are very smart; over time, they mutated and grew capacities to defend themselves against the antibiotics and thus came the emergence of antibiotic resistance.
The first case of antibiotic resistance causing fatality was within 10 years of the beginning of antibiotic use in the 1940s. This worried the founder so much that in his Nobel Prize award speech for the discovery of antibiotics, Alexander Fleming warned everybody about it. But the story continued.
Thus, recently, it has come into the picture that antibiotic resistance is greater than ever. MDR has become very common. The healthcare society had to take some great measures, and thus came the AMSP – Antimicrobial Stewardship Program.
AMSP is a program that guides and trains physicians to assess the rational use of antibiotics based on microbial culture and sensitivity testing, stopping blind therapy and promoting rational escalation and de-escalation.
MBH/AB