History Main / MagicalAntibiotics

* [[AvertedTrope Averted]] In ''VideoGame/{{Cataclysm}}, as antibiotics can only cure infected wounds and nothing else, they're not guaranteed to work anyway, and they reduce your Health stat, thus making you more susceptible to other diseases.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Cataclysm}}: Dark Days Ahead'', zombies can cause bite wounds, which require quick treatment or they will become infected wounds that cause all sorts of nasty penalties and eventual death. Fortunately, a single dose of antibiotics is enough to cure all infected wounds you have.

Any time a character develops an illness of any variety whatsoever, the medical provider will immediately insist upon throwing all manner of high-powered antibiotics at the patient in order to treat the "infection." This is a colossal fail, as there are thousands of species and dozens of classes of infectious organisms - bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi, yeasts, helminths [worms], parasites not otherwise specified, and so on. Of those, only bacteria are susceptible to antibiotics, and then only if that particular bacterial strain is sensitive to the prescribed antibiotic. Bacterial populations also evolve rapidly with time and drug exposure, giving rise to resistant infections - in which a bug [[NoSell no-sells]] what ''should'' be an effective course of antibiotic therapy. Notable examples of these nasties include MRSA, methicillin-resistant ''Staphylococcus aureus,'' and VRE, vancomycin-resistant ''Enterococcus''.

* Antiviral rather than antibiotic, but in ''Film/{{Outbreak}},'' Robbie contracts the Motaba virus and is on the brink of death before they administer the virus' antiserum. She is almost completely recovered after only a day. In reality, this is far too soon to recover from a hemorrhagic fever, which causes massive internal bleeding and organ failure.

* In ''Literature/ManyWaters'', when Dennys is fighting a fever brought on by a combination of heatstroke and being thrown into a garbage pit with torn-up skin, he thinks back to the last time he'd had the flu, when he "had antibiotics to fight the fever". This is made even worse by the fact that his parents are scientists who ought to have known that flu is caused by a virus and can't be treated with antibiotics.

* Played with on ''Series/{{House}}'': first prescribe the most widely useful antibiotics, then find out what they actually have before the patient's kidneys shut down because of the antibiotics.
** This trope also applies to cancer treatments. While in reality there are dozens of families of antineoplastic drugs, any of which is only effective and used on a handful of specific cancers, House's team is fond of using one-size-fits-all chemotherapy.
** House is one of those rare examples in fiction that acknowledges the existence of separate treatments for fungal and parasitic infections.
* Averted in a Jon Pertwee ''Series/DoctorWho'' story which has a major subplot about a deadly plague being released by the story's antagonists. The Doctor and Liz Shaw eventually find a cure by literally going through every single available antibiotic drug to see if it works in lab conditions. In the meantime the best they can do is use high doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics which are just effective enough to delay the plague's symptoms, and a character notes that this policy is causing severe side effects.

* Played straight in a ''Series/{{Sliders}}'' episode, where the protagonists end up in a world, where antibiotics were never discovered, and the nation is gripped by a deadly plague. Professor Arturo (a physicist!) manages to engineer a simple antibiotic from what he remembers in biology class, which is treated as a miracle cure.

* ''VideoGame/DrMario''. Thankfully, he has the cure.

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* There is a legend about some grave robbers during TheBlackDeath. Despite robbing, you know, ''plague victims'', they never got sick. When they were finally caught, they were asked to reveal their secret. It turns out that one of the grave robbers was a doctor or herbalist, and had fixed up some type of protection using herbs and spices [[ScienceMarchesOn that were later found]] to have antibiotic properties. (They didn't know that, but they ''did'' know that using these plant parts tended to result in less sickness.) It isn't known whether or not this was an actual event (hence its placement here), but the story ''did'' inspire (and/or has been used to promote) [[https://www.youngliving.com/en_US/products/thieves-essential-oil an essential oil blend called "Thieves."]]
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* ''VideoGame/DrMario''. Thankfully, he has the cure.
* In ''VideoGame/SevenDaysToDie'', curing a zombie infection doesn't even require antibiotics; you can just eat a jar of honey and be right as rain immediately, even if you're only one second away from keeling over dead...or undead, as the case may be.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Cataclysm}}: Dark Days Ahead'', zombies can cause bite wounds, which require quick treatment or they will become infected wounds that cause all sorts of nasty penalties and eventual death. Fortunately, a single dose of antibiotics is enough to cure all infected wounds you have.
* ''VideoGame/TheFlameInTheFlood'' lets you craft homemade antibiotics simply by roasting any two pieces of rotten food over a campfire. In some cases, it's preferable to deliberately let a wound get infected, since most food rots naturally over time, meaning you are almost guaranteed to have antibiotics or the ability to craft some compared to some more specific cures other injuries need.
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* ''[[SuperMarioBros Dr. Mario]]''. Thankfully, he has the cure.

** Note: This doesn't apply to hand sanitizer. The active ingredient in most hand sanitizers is alcohol; your typical sanitizer is basically 80 proof vodka turned into a gel. [[CaptainObvious Almost needless to say]], we've been using alcohol to kill microbes for millennia (without realizing it for most of that time), and none of the critters has ever developed a resistance to ''that''. The same goes for bleach, ammonia, peroxide, and acid (none of which you should get on your hands!).

** Sadly, this is far from a problem only in the developing world. Recent research in the UK, for example, showed that 48% of GPs had prescribed antibiotics to patients suffering from a common cold in the past year. Even in developed countries with socialised health care (where insurance companies and private payer demands are not important), antibiotic overuse is still a massive problem.

* Sadly prevalent in real life medicine, as providers frequently don't want to wait to culture an organism before attempting to treat it. A major cause of the explosion in the rates and severity of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. However, since a culture & sensitivity requires anywhere from one to five days to result and it looks [[{{Understatement}} kind of bad]] if your patient dies of his infection before the C&S report comes back, "empiric therapy" - prescribing a broad-spectrum antibiotic "cocktail" and narrowing it down when the C&S results - is common. This treatment is always prescribed in conjunction with a "pan culture" - culturing samples of the patient's blood, urine, stool, sputum, occasionally cerebrospinal fluid, and any wounds they might have, in order to pinpoint a source of infection. The classic example of this scenario is when someone is dragged into an ER unconscious, running a high fever and in apparent septic shock. They're dying, and you need to treat bacteremia immediately. What do you do? Bomb the infection with as broad-spectrum a cocktail as is reasonable, and hope the drugs kill the bugs before fatal damage results.

* In the last section of ''Literature/TheStand'', Stu Redman comes down with the flu. Tom Cullen, on the advice of his dead friend, finds some antibiotics and cures him. While Tom saving Stu's life is a CrowningMomentofHeartwarming, antibiotics don't cure the flu (a viral infection), and the antibiotics would be several months out of date, as it's after TheEndofTheWorldAsWeKnowIt.