Foundations

How Antibiotics Work: Targets, Spectrum & Selective Toxicity

You swallow a pill that kills billions of bacteria inside you — yet leaves your own cells completely unharmed. How can one drug tell the invader from the host so precisely? That single question, 'selective toxicity,' is the foundation of every antibiotic ever made. Answer it, and the whole bewildering list of drug classes collapses into a simple map of just six targets.

Antibiotic Resistance: How Bacteria Fight Back

Barely a decade after penicillin was unleashed, the bacteria it once wiped out were shrugging it off. Today, infections we thought conquered are killing again, and doctors are running out of drugs. But bacteria don't 'learn' to resist in the way we imagine — the truth is stranger and more dangerous, and it explains exactly why every unnecessary antibiotic makes the world a little sicker.

Choosing an Antibiotic: Cidal vs Static, Empiric Therapy & PK/PD

A patient is dying of sepsis and there's no time to wait for the lab — so how does a doctor pick the right antibiotic out of dozens, right now? And once chosen, why must one drug be given as a single big daily dose while another is dripped continuously all day? These aren't arbitrary rituals. They flow from a few elegant rules about how antibiotics actually kill.