On September 9, 2019, the pharmacist Guillermo Martín Melgar opened a thread on his Twitter account (@Farmaenfurecida) to make visible a situation that he had been observing for a long time. The picture was as follows: several fashion, beauty and lifestyle influencers , with thousands of followers on social networks, were recommending products to, among other things, eliminate pimples and blackheads. They weren’t talking about hiding them with a certain makeup base, no, what they were recommending were products that contained antibiotics . An example of this are some wipes impregnated with erythromycin (antibiotic) whose use should be directed by a health professional, which are used to treat acne and should not be applied indiscriminately. Come on, they were not suggesting cosmetic products but pure and hard drugs . By the way, the General Council of Colleges of Pharmacists (CGCF) detected a disproportionate demand for wipes of yore a few months ago, which shows the great influence that these people exert on the population and how dangerous it can be to recommend drugs when you are neither a doctor nor a pharmacist.
As if that were not enough, the suggestions do not remain in the antibiotic wipes, no. There are also those who recommend an ointment to treat infections , an antiviral for herpes, an anti-inflammatory, a drug used to treat ulcers and gastroesophageal reflux, the way to take an anti-flu … Doing this, we insist, is very dangerous .
“Recommending drugs on a massive scale is negligent because each person has specific characteristics and what can serve one person to another can harm them. For this reason, medications must always be prescribed by a specialist on an individual basis , and that is why the advertising of most of them is strictly prohibited: to prevent them from being consumed without control ”, Guillermo Martín Melgar tells us.
In the case of antibiotic drugs, their consumption “like crazy” because the famous, my friend or the neighbor on the fifth floor are doing well, can lead to an increase in the resistance problem. “Massively recommending an antibiotic is extremely dangerous because it can lead to someone who does not need it (for example, for the flu) to consume it, or to consume it without following correct administration guidelines. All of this can contribute to aggravating the resistance problem . That is why it is so important that we go to a professional: to diagnose and evaluate whether an antibiotic is necessary or not ”, continues Melgar.
And what are these resistors? The pharmacist explains it briefly: “Bacterial resistance is the ability of bacteria to survive the effects of the antibiotic through various mechanisms. This is causing them to stop responding to the effect of antibiotics, making them lose their effectiveness against infections . We are going back to the time before the discovery of penicillin ”. And this does not affect only those who self-medicate but everyone , hence the efforts by the health authorities so that the population does not take the use of antibiotics lightly: that it is not done of its own accord but by prescription of a doctor , that the treatment is not interrupted when one feels better but that all the prescribed doses are taken, etc.
Faced with this situation, in which drugs are being advertised (with a prescription it is illegal to do so and without it there are rules to be followed, including indicating that they are drugs and that in case of doubt consult a doctor or pharmacist), the Council General of Doctors and Pharmacists have recently filed a complaint with Health , who has contacted Google to remove this type of content. At first, the focus is on YouTube content, but as can be seen in Guillermo Martín Melgar’s thread, the recommendations are also made on the fashion network: Instagram.
