I’d just like to rant about antibiotics because they were mentioned in the post that started this thread. The whole ‘doctors must stop giving people antibiotics because they don’t work anymore due to over-use’ is a scam. They knew within a few years of the discovery of penicillin that it would soon be ineffective, which is why they kept developing new ones. They developed new ones because it was prudent to do so during the Cold War. There was never any money in developing antibiotics, Cold War govt. spending paid for the development of all of them. When the Cold War ended the funding dried up. When doctors were throwing antibiotics around like candy in the 70s and 80s there were a lot fewer sick people around. Even if you weren’t taking them, many of the people you interacted with were, so bacteria was beaten back and people’s immune systems could work more exclusively against viruses. It is, in my mind, not much of a stretch to extrapolate the number of homeless people around today as compared to in the 1980s to be greatly influenced by the differences in antibiotic proliferation between those two eras. I believe a lot of the social problems we see today are a result of antibiotic prohibition. I believe that if we ever want to enter a new age of prosperity, we will have to convince our governments to fund the development of new antibiotics, and turn the tap back on in dispensing the old ones. It doesn’t matter that people with colds ask for antibiotics and don’t get relief from them because colds are viruses, the act of a person taking antibiotics, even if they don’t ‘need’ them is prophylactic to the rest of us. And sure, if phage therapy looks promising, develop that too, we need all the help we can get against the scourge of microbiota. I don’t believe antibiotic use causes allergies in children, either. And don’t get me started on probiotics, they have their place in very small amounts after a round of antibiotics but otherwise they are mostly more harmful than helpful. We’ve been sold a bill of goods for a long time on microbiota and the replication crisis has demonstrated that certain areas of ‘science’ are largely steered by bias, be it political, ideological, or even wishful thinking.. (btw, I am pro-GMO and anti-natural-must-be-good)
There are a lot of unfounded claims made in this post, but I’ll stick with this one for now.
No, antibiotic over-prescribing (for which patients and physicians share blame) is not good for the general population. The development of resistance to antibiotics due to overuse and the emergence of “superbugs” is a real and growing problem.
Now that we have people taking ivermectin like candy for the wrong indications, it’s inevitable that parasites resistant to it will develop and harm people who’d never taken ivermectin before (ivermectin-resistant parasites have already been seen).
There are proposals now to make doxycycline available over the counter (the push largely relates to the idea that it can be used as a “morning after” pill for those engaging in unsafe sex, and for its use in treating real and imagined cases of Lyme disease). If that becomes law, expect doxycycline to become considerably less effective in the future.
You can’t say “just develop new antibiotics”. It’s a complicated process and new classes of antibiotics take many years and huge investment to develop (yes, governments should take more initiative here, but in the U.S. right now infectious diseases are on the back burner, to say the least).
If there’s evidence that indiscriminate use of antibiotics makes us healthier, I’d like to see it. These drugs do not come without side effects. and any placebo effect of using them for viral infections must be vastly outweighed by the harm they can do.
Even if we accepted the unsupported assertions in your post (and I don’t) this conclusion is woefully unsubstantiated. You seem to be grasping at straws to connect many unrelated ideas to antibiotics.
Can you provide any evidence of this claim?
This whole discussion is pointless. For those of us who have done our own research, it is well known that the germ theory of disease is a scam promoted by the illuminati. The real cause of ‘bacterial’ infections is crystallized structures from the higher 5th dimension entering our 3 dimensional world and causing errors in our cellular mechanics. Antibiotics only work because the crystal harmonics are reversed when the chemicals interact with our DNA, much like a bow making music as it interacts with violin strings.
You weren’t supposed to tell.
Illuminati should be capitalized. You are demoted two steps in rank.
Sounds exactly like Icke.
Let’s go after these claims one at a time.
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I’d like to see ANY shred of evidence that this is actually true. Let’s use pneumonia as an example. Antibiotics have always been a pretty standard treatment of pneumonia, partly because there was no vaccine for viral pneumonia. But this chart shows that since 1980, when you assert doctors were “throwing antibiotics around like candy” the death rate from pneumonia was much higher than it is now.
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Not to mention that antibiotic resistance was well known since 1942. It’s a basic law of biology that if something doesn’t have a 100% kill rate, whatever of that species that survives will pass its immunity to the next generation.
If you’re part of a certain demographic that doesn’t believe in evolution, then it’s a lot easier to hand-wave all the concerns about antibiotic resistance and similar things away, because understanding and believing that they exist also essentially requires you to understand and believe that evolution is how the world works.
I mean, how are you going to acknowledge that bacteria and parasites can have what amounts to natural selection and evolution going on with respect to antibiotic use, and NOT also understand/admit that the same exact process goes on with humans as well. I’m sure someone somewhere has some Byzantine logic about how it’s not the same thing, etc… in order to reconcile that antibiotic resistance and natural selection are true, yet evolution with people never happened, but I’m also sure it’s extremely tortured logic that doesn’t hold up.
Reminds of the lady on Omega 3 ads.
“Take it, it’s good for you!”
Yeah, I don’t believe her either.
What reminds and who is the either?
Omega 3s actually are good for you in various ways though. That’s why there are prescription versions of these and why baby formula is fortified with them.
Oh that’s fine. I have no problem if you want to use them.
It’s the ad lady. The way she says “take them, they’re good for you” just sets my teeth on edge.
I pretty sure you can get Omega 3s cheaper than they are hawking them for, anyway.
Doxycycline as a “morning after pill” will not prevent pregnancy (although it sure can reduce the effectiveness of birth control pills!) but it can prevent or treat sexually transmitted diseases. Some women actually take antibiotics after sex, to reduce their chance of getting UTIs from this if lesser measures don’t work.
A major issue in antibiotic resistance is their misuse in livestock production. Got a sick animal? Medicate them, you bet, but giving poultry a homeopathic dose of tetracycline so it will reach butcher weight a day or two early (this does not, to my knowledge, increase growth in other animals) should not be done routinely.
ETA: Ivermectin does not work for cryptosporidiosis, the water-born diarrheal disease that’s getting a lot of press right now.
Surely if this is actual practice, the dose has to be significant?
Homeopathy is bunk. Might seem to work by placebo effect if you believe in it, but I doubt if poultry do…
Important yes, but a separate issue.
https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/parenting/antibiotics-the-dangers-of-overprescribing/
Another source of harm is inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics for so-called “chronic Lyme disease”, which can be deleterious to patients as well as encouraging development of antibiotic resistance.
I rather suspect that there is no bacterium in the developed world by now that isn’t resistant to amoxicillin. That’s been handed out routinely for so many decades now that it is probably about as effective as a suspension of pink chalk…
Nope. Antibiotic overuse (like treating infections of non-living viruses) places biochemical pressure on existing susceptible bacteria. Naturally occurring genetic variants will have resistance to that antibiotic, or acquire it (cf. plasmids) and outgrow susceptible bacteria. Now you have a resistant strain. I’ve done this in a lab, and have seen it happen to patients in clinic. So, the opposite happens from your claim: people not taking antibiotics are at risk of an infection with the resistant strain that is harder to treat. Pray that you are not infected with MRSA, VRE, or CRE from someone else.
Amoxicillin is still considered effective in some settings, including in dentistry for treating oral infections, and in eradicating H. pylori in the stomach.