Anti-inflammatory and antibacterial are always confused in many people’s lives. If you have a cold and a sore throat, you should take some anti-inflammatory drugs, and if you have a wound on your skin, you should take some anti-inflammatory drugs. In the end, how to distinguish between understanding anti-inflammatory drugs and antibacterial drugs, let’s make it easy to understand. First of all, the term anti-inflammatory drugs is not accurate, because there is no pharmacological “anti-inflammatory drugs”, the standard term should actually be “anti-inflammatory drugs”. The anti-inflammatory is inflammation, and what is inflammation is a pathological phenomenon, manifested as “redness, swelling, heat, pain” and dysfunction, which can be caused by a variety of reasons, bacterial infection is only one of them. Antibacterial drugs, as the name implies, are antibacterial drugs, most of which can also be called antibiotics. So by definition, anti-inflammatory drugs do not correlate with antibacterial drugs. One acts on inflammation-causing factors and one acts on pathogenic microorganisms. If there is a relationship, it is that infectious diseases cause inflammatory responses that require a combination of antibacterial and anti-inflammatory drugs. Anti-inflammatory drugs are used to reduce fever, pain and swelling, such as ibuprofen, anti-inflammatory pain, paracetamol, aspirin, diclofenac, and the famous “hormones”: dexamethasone, methylprednisolone, prednisolone, budesonide. Prednisone, budesonide, fluticasone, etc. The antimicrobials are more familiar, such as penicillin, amoxicillin, cefradin, cefaclor, erythromycin, azithromycin, clindamycin, etc. In clinical applications, only bacterial infections are treated with antibacterials, while anti-inflammatory drugs do not kill bacteria, but can reduce some manifestations of inflammation, so sometimes a combination is needed. For non-infectious inflammation of the body tissue dysfunction, we do not need to use antibacterial drugs, but only anti-inflammatory drugs to treat. For example, for arthritis, we can choose ibuprofen to relieve pain and inflammation; for allergic rhinitis, we can choose hormonal nasal sprays to relieve symptoms, and for asthma, we can use inhaled hormones to relieve symptoms.