http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/risk/breast-antibiotics
http://www.cdc.gov/getsmart/antibiotic-use/anitbiotic-resistance-faqs.html
Cause vs correlation! From your second link:
**
These results do not mean that antibiotics cause cancer, only that there is an association between the two.**
See, you would consider it unacceptable if even one of your children were permanently harmed by a disease. I think you need to put yourself in the mindset of an early mother. Your plan is to have many births (say 5 minimum). That way, when 2 of your children die before the age of 5 and 1 goes blind or lame, you’ll still have 2 left to run the farm. (And thus, you see why 5 was sort of a minimum.)
As for the eye infections specifically; yes, most of those would not lead to blindness, even if untreated. However, a percentage of them did lead to blindness. There were plenty of blind and lame people trying to make their way through life back in the day.
I had a personal awakening to this about 15 years ago when I spilled a pot of boiling water on my foot. Because of my shoes and socks, the water had a few extra seconds to burn the skin and a pretty large patch of skin on the ankle and top/side of the foot just sloughed off while I was taking the sock off. I remember thinking how even a simple mistake like that could very well have killed me 1000 years ago… and had I survived, a lingering infection could have crippled that foot. In the modern age, I went to the emergency room, got sterile bandages, took some drugs for the pain, avoided infection altogether and today the scars are only noticeable if you know what to look for. But even in the modern age, it was months before it fully healed.
Sometimes the infections do a lot of nonlethal damage first, though. For instance, one of my uncles became deaf in one ear after an ear infection. He recovered just fine…except that he’d permanently lost hearing in that ear. So even if the infection resolves eventually, the patient experiences a lot more pain (because the infection lasts longer) and might also permanently lose some function in a body part.
Indeed they could. I have no cite, but I was told that 25% of suicides during one period studied in the Middle Ages in Europe were attributed to dental pain.
It makes sense if you think about it - you can’t eat, you can’t sleep, and no analgesics besides alcohol or (if you were lucky, and not a peasant) opium.
Regards,
Shodan
The whole body of evidence needs to be considered. But grabbing one part of one link is always nice. Let’s say I grab one part of one link, too:
*# Alternatively, if there is a cause-and-effect relationship, how do researchers think that antibiotic use might lead to breast cancer?
Based on current understanding, there are a couple of possible explanations for why antibiotics might lead to breast cancer. One theory is that antibiotics can affect bacteria in the intestine, which may impact the way certain foods that protect against cancer are broken down in the body. Another possibility is that antibiotics can affect the body’s immune response and response to inflammation, both of which could be related to the development of cancer. Many more studies are necessary to better understand how or why antibiotics could lead to cancer.
*
Which of course was called “life” back then. Children dying, lameness, blindness, etc. were expected more. While surely it would have been saddening to find your 4 year old dead from a fever, it would hardly be as world-crushing as it would today.
Someday cancer may seem a medieval death.
In your scenario, fully a quarter of all treated don’t eliminate the infection. I don’t see any justification for such a high number. This happened to me all of one time in my life and the doctor simply prescribed the exact same antibiotic again and it worked.
You also have a statistic for 0.5% complications or death without antibiotics. I suppose it depends on what type of infection, so this might be plausibe for a stubbed toe.
Is it really reasonable that antibiotic treatment would lead to “raging infections” a year later? Where is the statistic for that? Make sure that people with artificial joints aren’t included, since biofilms require antibiotic treatment, but will not go away with them.
I’m not disagreeing that antibiotics should be reserved for necessary treatments, but your scenario is wildly unfavorable to antibiotics in my experience.
As for cancer, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a correlation on several levels. For one thing, people prone to infection likely have a compromised immune system. Their system may be too busy with other things to deal with cancer. Also, there is at least some indication that all antibiotics work by generating hydroxy radicals. Radicals do have a tendency to cause cancer.
I’d still choose antibiotics when I need them.
I’d opt for antibiotics when it is serious. Still, antibiotics kill bacteria - the good and the bad. I don’t want them unless I need them.
I am not condemning antibiotics.
There is also a correlation between antibiotic use and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL).
I understand the cause vs. correlation issue. I know that if 90% of child molesters are in possession of X-rated videos that the X-rated videos are not the cause or even a contributor. It is likely that molesters who are driven enough to capture or rape a young child are most likely interested in dirty movies, and not hesitant to buy them. The perv is gonna have perv material. The perv material is not causing anything.
But the cancer link (Breast and NHL) is a very curious one, because their is a clear potential for the link to be causal. Sure, it could be that some people just get more infections, so are likely to have more antibiotic regimens over their lifetime. Maybe they get more infections because their immune system sucks. In this case, maybe the antibiotics didn’t cause anything. People with sucky immune systems might be more prone to cancer. Maybe antibiotics help short-term, but gradually weaken the immune system further, as gut flora, which play a role in the immune system, are destroyed. Sort of like plugging a weak tire to get home. You plug the tire, which has the instant result of it being better than a flat/dead tire, but you won’t have a tire that is as good as new. You can plug it up a number of times, each time saving it, and each time shortening its service life.
I really think that antibiotics are going to be placed in the tire-plugging category. It saves the tire’s life; it keeps it from death, and you could probably get along almost fine until the tire runs bald, but if you keep plugging the tire (and maybe because the tire is inherently weak), you end up with something that is prone to its own destruction.
Quote:
"Do you know how hot it needs to be to kill bacteria? I suspect it’s about the same temperature as you need to cook flesh. Meat has to be cooked to at least 160 F or 165 F to kill E Coli. Meduim-rare beef is 130-135 F. "
According to the Sainted Dr. Laubengayer from back when I was an Army Medic, hot soaks for bacterial infections didn’t kill the bacteria but stopped them from reproducing, allowing the antibiotics and/or the body’s natural defenses to kill them off without more of them showing up all the time. Hot soaks also tended to cause a spread out infection to concentrate at one point so you could lance it and drain it. They were as hot as you could stand it, never hot enough to injure.
Getting back to the question in the OP, one shouldn’t forget that drainage of an infection (i.e. opening up an abscess other walled off bacterial infection so that the pus leaves the body) can be curative even without the use of antibiotics. Conversely, even with antibiotics, if an abscess or other walled off infection isn’t drained, the infection may persist
Recover? You want to recover? You’re Mad, I say!