Talk:Antimicrobial

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The current page has been written from the perspective of alternative medicines and does not reflect much understanding of the term antimicrobial. For example, the common use of the term antibiotic to describe any antimicrobial, semi-synthetic or synthetic antimicrobial does not properly differentiate them, which is what an encyclopedia is supposed to do. Yet the author seems satisfied to not differentiate the various antimicrobials into antiviral, antihelminthic and so on, and just lump any antimicrobial into the group antibiotic. The remainder of his/her discussion is alarmism and folkloric claptrap. Resistance to antimicrobials is certainly an issue which most people are aware of, but there is no discussion of the mechanisms, progression of the problem or possible routes of avoidance. Traditional medicine may occasionally use extracts with antimicrobial properties, but traditional healers rely on traditions that were in existence in times before the discovery of microbes, before the refutation of the theory of spontaneous generation and before the discovery of antibiotics or the description of their mechanisms of action. In other words, traditional medicine has no scientific basis and should not be relied upon as a source of information about antimicrobials, which spring from the application of scientific method. At best, it is a footnote about the origin of quinine and artemisinin and their chemical derivatives in the treatment and prevention of malaria.

--Eukaryotica 15:57, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

This article should be removed. It is so distorted that the bad outweighs what little correct information is present.

[edit] Attempted fixing

I believe I improved the article quite a bit. I removed the large section on nitrofuranes (which was incoherent, lacked formatting and belongs to the appropriate Wiki page, not here) and most of the information about antimicrobial elements/ions (which also belongs elsewhere and needs editing and several citations to be encyclopedic). I created sections for antifungals, antivirals and antiparasitics, which were previously missing. I fetched the content from the respective pages and edited it a bit. It's far from perfect, but better than having a page about antimicrobials without any information about these classes of drugs. I removed the POV tag, as I believe the article is now fairly neutral. At least it isn't so heavily focused on alternative medicine any more.

I fixed a lot of other things too, hopefully didn't make too many errors (I'm well versed in pharmacology and know my way around microbiology as well, but there were some things I didn't completely understand (eg. the nitroglycerine thing). DiamonDie 13:25, 11 November 2007 (UTC)