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If there's been any problem with advancements in medicine, like antibiotics, it's that people were too quick to say, "This is the answer! We've got it for all time!" and then stop looking for other answers.
The first answer you find to any medical or technological problem is not necessarily the permanent one, even though it "works." In medicine and technology, we've seized on a lot of solutions we wanted to think were permanent (petroleum-based energy, certain antibiotics), and gotten comfortable with them. We stopped looking for new answers. And the flaws in the solutions that we'd accepted eventually came back to bite us. All that means is, we have to start looking for new answers again -- and we never should have stopped in the first place.
To get the discussion somewhat back on topic, one way to make antibiotics _as they are_ work for you is to use them intelligently and see about changing the conditions which makes their use so necessary. Frankly, if you live your life intelligently the need for antibiotics is reduced, although never eliminated.
As I mentioned above, I found I needed antibiotics after flu because congestion in my sinuses tended to lead to secondary infections. So I started doing a couple of things during flu (and any bad bout of head congestion):
* At intervals, drinking a large glass of warm water spiked with a dozen drops of Tabasco sauce. Read this in a medical column -- it seems to dilate everything in your head and lungs that _can_ dilate, and eases congestion pretty well.
* Crush a couple of cloves of raw garlic twice and day and eat 'em. Garlic contains a natural though mild antibiotic agent which doesn't seem to have issues with resistance.
Since I started doing that, ten years ago, I've never since had a "relapse" (aka secondary sinus infection) after the flu. And so I haven't needed antibiotics.
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