Resistance

Pharmacology. Yikes! We continue to have the much dreaded (but interesting!) subject in this semester too. And guess what, we have more of those dreaded subjects like Pharm.Chem, Pharmacognosy (which are quite interesting too, but need quite a lot of work to put in ). I remember trying to cram all those GIT drugs last semester. Histamine receptor inhibitors, proton pump inhibitors, antidiarrhoeals and so on. I remember making dumb sounding mnemonics to remember them, but in the end, it was all worthwhile. Pharmacology, as a subject is quite intriguing. So this semester, we will be studying the Anticancer agents, antimalarials, and last but not the least, the AMAs! We have started with the AMAs ( Antimicrobial agents! ) and though there are too many drugs (-_-') , they are quite fascinating to study about. From what we have been taught up till now, I can just say that- If you've been prescribed an antibiotic course, please make sure to not miss any dose, and please see to it that you complete the course! Once you start the course, the symptoms may disappear, but that does not imply that you've been cured! It just means that those nasty microbes are building up resistance, and missing the next dose would mean giving them a chance to multiply. Now of course, you don't want that, do you? Many people leave their courses midway, thinking that they have no symptoms and have nothing to worry about, but end up at the doctor's after few days. And now, treating this infection is difficult since the course given previously is ineffective. Resistance, the defence mechanism exhibited by microbes serves as an evidence to the theory of Natural Selection put forth by Darwin. The microbes are much better at evolution than us humans ( Sigh! ). Resistance shown by microbes is basically of two types: Natural and Acquired. Natural resistance, as the name suggests, is naturally present. The microbes are insensitive to a particular drug maybe because they lack a certain target site to which the drug selectively binds, or maybe because they lack some metabolic processes which the drug has the ability to inhibit. Acquired resistance, on the other hand, is developed by the microbe on exposure to antibiotics. There are certain mechanisms like conjugation, transformation, transduction and so on. The much prevalent Multiple drug resistance tuberculosis ( MDR-TB) infection is a glimpse of how acquired resistance works. The reason for this is of course, overuse or misuse of antimicrobials. People consume antibiotics like I consume chocolates ( which would mean 20 a day, JK :P) . So anyway, the purpose of writing this blog was just to spread the awareness that one must complete an antibiotic therapy and not miss any doses or leave it halfway, because the consequences maybe life threatening as seen in people suffering from  MDR-TB. Bye for now, gotta catch up on my chocolate doses. Missing them would be life threatening for me :P