Acne is one of those skin conditions that everyone tends to experience a few times in their life. Hormones, as well as oils of your skin, can all play a role in creating a breakout. This makes it difficult to escape. People with acne prone skin often have the worst time of trying to control their outbreak and even OROGOLD’s past tips on how to deal with acne can only help manage it. The absolute worst cases of acne tend to be treated via antibiotics to help kill the bacteria responsible for breakouts and help restore the skin to a less inflamed condition so that normal acne management options can take over. Unfortunately, it seems to be becoming increasingly clear that acne is going to get a lot harder to manage in the future due to the bacteria responsible slowly becoming drug resistant.

What Does that Mean?
Drug-resistant bacteria, as the name implies, are strains of bacteria that become either highly resistant or immune to conventional methods of management or sterilization practices. These strains of bacteria are sometimes isolated and then become a local issue. The broad use of antibiotics is creating a growing rise in strains of drug-resistant bacteria around the globe and causing doctors to look into newer forms of treatment rather than relying on thoroughly tested methods. Acne is, ultimately, one of the more benign emerging strains of drug-resistant bacteria. A handful of bacteria are responsible for acne and one of them may even be a beneficial form of bacteria trying to fight off the ones causing the actual problems. Antibiotics were an effective approach for severe cases of acne because of comparative ease of use and overall effectiveness. No drug is perfect though and this is where the problem starts.

How Does Something Become Drug Resistant?
A somewhat inaccurate way of answering this question is “survival of the fittest”. Antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria, but wiping out all of anything is difficult. There are always faster, hardier, and stronger representatives of any population of organisms. People like to opine that “that which does not kill you only makes you stronger”. This is devastatingly true when it comes to populations of bacteria. Each use of antibiotics will wipe out the majority of a population and, ideally, if you use them properly for the full length of time it will render the rest susceptible enough to an immune response to destroy the remainder. OROGOLD hates to bring it up, but most people don’t use antibiotic products properly. They stop before they should because they appear to have worked. This results in a surviving population of bacteria that resisted dying outright from antibiotics that can then repopulate and cause trouble again. The bad part is this cycle happens constantly.

What Can be Done?
The best thing to remember is that you should use any antibiotics prescribed to you, whether they are for severe acne or another issue, for as long as you’ve been told to use them. This can help reduce the growing number of strains of drug-resistant bacteria. Anyone suffering from severe acne can potentially find hope in the fact that there have been studies involving using probiotics to fight acne as well. These can boost the possible “good” strain of bacteria among the acne bacteria that help fight off the rest. This is still in the early stages of study though. The best thing you can do to help your skin is to eat right and use products selected specifically for your skin type when fighting acne. You should be able to manage and slowly heal your skin that way. Preventing or controlling the size of outbreaks will serve you best with acne prone skin.

Respecting and caring for your skin is part of what a skin care routine is about. It shows you’re invested in your well being. Acne can make it look and feel like you’ve failed at that task, but the truth couldn’t be farther from that. OROGOLD suggests viewing acne as one of the difficult factors to control about skin. You can still keep doing you best to manage your skin’s health despite the growing antibiotic resistance. After all, only a small portion of people will need those antibiotics and with new treatments being investigated all the time there may just be something brand new and highly effective in the near future.