MANY Malaysians walk into clinics with their minds already made up long before the doctor has said a word: they have a cold, they feel terrible, and they want antibiotics.
Some will even push back if the doctor dares to suggest otherwise, convinced that leaving without a course of the stuff means leaving without proper treatment.
But does insisting on antibiotics for a cold actually help you get better faster?
Verdict:
FALSE
The common cold is caused by a virus, most commonly the rhinovirus, and that one detail changes everything.
Antibiotics are medicines specifically designed to fight infections caused by bacteria, and since viruses are an entirely different beast, antibiotics have no effect on them whatsoever.
A major review published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which pooled data from over 1,900 participants across multiple clinical trials, found no evidence that antibiotics do anything useful for patients with the common cold.
It did not matter whether participants had taken antibiotics or a placebo: their colds lasted roughly the same amount of time either way.
If that is not enough reason to reconsider, antibiotics can also cause real harm when taken unnecessarily.
Around one in ten people who took antibiotics for a cold experienced side effects, most commonly diarrhoea, nausea and other stomach or bowel problems, with skin rashes and vaginal thrush also commonly reported.
There is also a much bigger problem brewing closer to home.
A study drawing on Malaysia's National Medical Care Survey, which covered 129 government clinics and 416 private clinics nationwide, found that upper respiratory tract infections accounted for nearly half of all antibiotic prescriptions written in Malaysian primary care.
Close to half of all patients diagnosed with such infections left the clinic with antibiotics, with the rate at private clinics running significantly higher than at government facilities.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria gradually become immune to antibiotics through repeated exposure, making the drugs far less effective when they are genuinely needed to treat serious bacterial infections.
Doctors also caution that even when a cold produces yellow or green nasal discharge, something many patients and some clinicians instinctively read as a sign of bacterial infection, it does not actually mean bacteria are involved or that antibiotics are needed.
Antibiotics should only be considered if a bacterial infection develops as a complication of the cold, though this is something that happens very rarely.
For the common cold, the most effective approach remains the least glamorous one: rest, stay hydrated and let the body do what it was built to do.
Sources:
1. https://www.cochrane.org/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
5. https://www.cdc.gov/
