Do I need an antibiotic to get rid of the infection?

Intimately tied to the first question, I am asked this question as often as the first.  Unfortunately, medicine and dentistry have done poor jobs at educating patients about antibiotics.  These are adjunctive drugs designed to help your body fight an infection, but they never have, do not now, nor will they ever cure infections.  In fact one of the places that happens to be the worse to contract infections is the hospital. Your body was designed with an immune system and this is what rids the body of infections along with removing the source of the infection.

Please understand, I am not against antibiotics and I do write prescriptions for them, but after 25 years of practice I find that I am writing probably 80% less antibiotic prescriptions than I did when I first graduated from dental school because it just is not necessary most of the time!

Article written by Dr. Leon.