Dr Amir Khan

And they'll say to me, no, but I want antibiotics because they always make me feel better.

It's the time that's making you feel better, not the tablets.

I will say to them, look, this is going to kill your good gut microbiome as well.

And that in the long term is going to be... When we say it's bad for your immune system, it's not because you're becoming reliant on those antibiotics to fight infections.

It is because the antibiotics are killing your gut microbiome

gut microbiome that help your immune response.

And it's really important that you understand that when it's viral.

Don't take antibiotics.

It is not worth it long term for your immune system.

It's just not.

And I'm so sure because my gut microbiome was knackered.

And the other thing we see a lot of, and this is why we're really careful.

You know, when we look at antibiotic prescribing, we have...

You know, certain antibiotics that we prescribe for certain things, like for you will know, for UTIs, we prescribe nitrofurantoin trimethoprim because they target UTIs.

And for chest infections, you might get amoxicillin or for tonsillitis, you get penicillin.

And the reason we have very specific ones is because they have a narrow range.

But there are broad spectrum antibiotics as well, which kill a wider range of bugs.

And when people are on broad spectrum antibiotics, particularly if they go into hospital, they get given broad spectrum antibiotics to kill, you know,

whatever it is whatever it is uh and then they get something called c diff clostridium difficile you know when they get an awful diarrhea in hospital it's because all the helpful bacteria have all disappeared and these bad bacteria think hello there's loads of space in this hotel now let's take over this hotel and then that becomes really difficult to treat so when you're on antibiotics

Take it just as long as you need them, not for any longer.