Bioética prescripción antibiótica y resistencia bacteriana

Medical professionals, health institutions, pharmacists and the civil community in general must be part of ethical discussions and not only scientific ones on the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, self-medication or self-prescription. Current bioethics emphasizes self-care and care for others and considers infectious and contagious diseases as a public health problem of the present and the future.

Bioethics invites critical reflection on the daily practice of antibiotic prescription in the hospital and community environment with or without a prescription. It helps to understand that an inappropriate and irrational prescription of an antibiotic contributes to bacterial resistance. Resistance is produced when bacteria mutate in response to the indiscriminate use of these drugs; it is bacteria and not humans that become resistant to antibiotics through overuse.

In order to know the relationship between bioethics, antibiotic prescription and bacterial resistance, a non-systematic bibliographic review of articles on basic bioethics, and normative ethics applied through ethical theories in Web Bioethics and in PubMed was carried out regarding bacterial resistance and prescription. of antibiotics. The objective of this article was to make a bioethical reflection on the medical prescription of antibiotics associated with bacterial resistance.