A Potentially Important Paper about the Inadequacy of Currently Used Antibiotic Resistance Detection Methods

© 2013 Peter Free

 

23 August 2015

 

Introduction

 

I ordinarily do not cross post between my websites. However, what follows is medically important enough to justify an exception.

 

 

News on the antibiotic resistance front — testing may just have become way more complicated

 

A new study indicates that antibiotic resistance in at least some patients depends upon where in the body the infection is — meaning in which tissues and which cells.

 

This is a finding that everyone — meaning anyone who may someday fall ill with an infection — needs to know about.

 

As the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Julie Cohen labeled it, the study’s results (if replicated) probably mandate a “paradigm shift” in clinical medical practice.

 

Not all physicians will be aware of this just published study’s implications. You arguably need to be.

 

 

This is not say that something is happening that Medicine has not seen before

 

It does, however, indicate that we now have a clue as to why significant numbers of infections have not been successfully treated — under circumstances in which laboratory drug resistance testing told us they should have been.

 

The new study’s findings imply that “Medicine” is going to have to come up with dramatically different techniques regarding how to test at least some microbial infections for drug resistance. Clinical practice will almost certainly have to change, too. (Provided, of course, that the study’s findings are corroborated.)

 

 

Rather than rewrite what I have already posted at BrainiYak

 

I provide the following link. Scientifically and medically knowledgeable readers will understand it — my apologies to those who struggle:

 

Peter Free, Host dependent, tissue and cell-specific antibiotic resistance — appears to explain why some antibiotic resistant infections do not respond to antibiotic therapy — either with the drugs or at the dosages that lab cultures predicted — If true, a large shift in our clinical thinking and antimicrobial resistance testing is required, BrainiYak (23 August 2015)