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Importance Of Antibiotics A Turning Point In The History Of Medicine

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Antibiotics: A Turning Point in the History of Medicine History is a never ending network of routes through time. This route can be changed by a turning point to make history go down a different path, and this change could either be for the better or for the worse. There are many notable turning points such as the invention of the wheel in B.C times, or the printing press in the 1400s, or even the foundation of McDonald’s in the 1950s. Antibiotics, a group of medicinal drugs that fight infectious microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses have made a lasting impact on history, even though it is relatively new. The invention of antibiotics is an important turning point in the history of medicine because it allowed humans to fight bacterial …show more content…
Chemotherapy is a method to cure cancer by using drugs. Although cancer is not caused by bacteria, it was thought to be caused by bacteria for a long time. And the methods used for chemotherapy used today are still the same methods devised when bacteria was thought to be the cause of cancer. One chemotherapeutic method is to stop the main function of the cell membrane. “The cell membrane is made up of proteins that control what goes in and out of the cell” (Guilfoile). The medicine would cause a lack of proteins in the cell and the cell dies. In the cancer cell, the cell membrane has to block out white blood cells. The medicine would stop the cancer cell membrane from blocking out white blood cells, so the white blood cell could enter and wreak havoc within the cell, causing the cancer cell to die. Another method of destroying a cancer cell is to “inhibit nucleic acid synthesis” (Saleh 3). That is a complex way of explaining a process to stop the formation of nucleic bases used in DNA. DNA is a genetic code and nucleic bases are used to replicate the code to create more cells. A medicine would mess up the process of creating the nucleic acids and the replication of cancer cells would not be possible. This would make it a lot easier for the immune system to fight off the cells, and the cancer threat would be reduced. …show more content…
It has been shown to cure bacterial infections when the immune system needs help. Antibiotics have led to the discovery of chemotherapeutic methods we use today to treat cancer. But Antibiotics, unfortunately, caused bacteria to evolve in a way that is dangerous to humans. The Turning Point in history known as Antibiotics has done much to the world. Antibiotics has impacted us in the past, in the present, and hopefully will in the

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