Chapelle said...
ok, once again I am sorry for the confusion. I did not mean for the conversation to become an argument as to whether or not rifampin is an antibiotic.
specifically it is an antimicrobial. I have also seen it referred to as an antiviral. As a pharmacist, we are picky about the classes of drugs, and yes, most doctors classify it as an antibiotic.
sorry again, wish i hadn't said anything lol
I already edited my post, so are we all good? =)
Okay someone picked a fight with me on reddit because I referred to "herbal antibiotics" and they claimed they made antimicrobials not antibiotics. Now it was completely beside the point of my statement and purely semantics which i have little tolerance for, but i'm still curious... What exactly is the difference? Every place I read gives a different definition, but almost always it seems that antibiotic is a subset of an antimicrobial. Other places say antibiotics must be derived from microorganisms, but that doesn't seem to be a widely accepted definition given the number of synthetics commonly referred to as antibiotics. Some places omitted any mention of growth inhibition, but then again... tetracyclines. Is this just some reductionist labeling madness or is there real a clear and valuable distinction? I personally just tend to think of antimicrobials as inhibiting a broader class of organisms including viruses and fungi but idk.