We certainly shouldn't use them as often as we do.
As I see it, doses of antibiotics should be as tightly controlled as radiotherapy. Nobody should be ALLOWED to take antibiotics home. Nobody should be trusted with them outside of a controlled environment where dosage plans are strictly enforced.
The way society demands instant relief for everything, leading to inappropriate and excessive antibiotic prescribing, is criminal.
The other inconvenient fact is that no new antibiotics for community use have been developed since the 1970s and there isn't really anything revolutionary in the pipeline.
So there is very likely nothing coming to save us once our 50+ year old tricks stop working.
The amount of North Americans who are dependent on sleeping pills is unfathomable.
There's clear guidance that sedative use for any more than a few days/few weeks more or less irrevocably harms the natural sleep-wake cycle and makes people permanently dependent on pills to sleep in any form, even with tolerance building and diminishing returns.
Most patients don't give a shit. They only can about getting to sleep tonight ASAP and don't see anything wrong with requiring a pill every night for decades, other than occasionally coming back demanding "something stronger" when it evitably stops working.
I'm more familiar with what happened with glyphosate resistance.
Farmers get clever and think they can go for a 100% kill and then a year or two later the shit stops working because there's no reservoir of non-immunity.
I've been polite and tried to avoid going straight to the Logan's Run argument, but you haven't let up. Frankly, viruses that single out the old and infirm are a good thing. Your perception of the cost being marginal ignores the significant cost the elderly and infirm take on the economy and society by merely existing.
I acknowledge that everything that is born is ordained to die from its inception. The trouble is greed and fear. People greedily cling to life valuing quantity over quality.
How many billions do we collectively spend every year so that people can eke out another year of suffered existence, driven simply by greedy love of existence or fear of the inevitable? How much else could be done with those resources?
There was a time, not so long ago, when pneumonia was regarded as the friend of the elderly. Of all the ways to die of age (bearing in mind that everything does die) it is one of the swiftest and least painful; it's not a lingering death.
Just as we don't squander organ transplants on people over a certain age (it depends on the organ and the country but generally past 60 the only organ you might get is a kidney), I don't think we should squander one penny dealing with respiratory illness, unless it's a disease that hits the young and healthy hard (like spanish flu).
We certainly shouldn't use them as often as we do.
As I see it, doses of antibiotics should be as tightly controlled as radiotherapy. Nobody should be ALLOWED to take antibiotics home. Nobody should be trusted with them outside of a controlled environment where dosage plans are strictly enforced.
The way society demands instant relief for everything, leading to inappropriate and excessive antibiotic prescribing, is criminal.
The other inconvenient fact is that no new antibiotics for community use have been developed since the 1970s and there isn't really anything revolutionary in the pipeline.
So there is very likely nothing coming to save us once our 50+ year old tricks stop working.
The amount of North Americans who are dependent on sleeping pills is unfathomable.
There's clear guidance that sedative use for any more than a few days/few weeks more or less irrevocably harms the natural sleep-wake cycle and makes people permanently dependent on pills to sleep in any form, even with tolerance building and diminishing returns.
Most patients don't give a shit. They only can about getting to sleep tonight ASAP and don't see anything wrong with requiring a pill every night for decades, other than occasionally coming back demanding "something stronger" when it evitably stops working.
I'm more familiar with what happened with glyphosate resistance.
Farmers get clever and think they can go for a 100% kill and then a year or two later the shit stops working because there's no reservoir of non-immunity.
I've been polite and tried to avoid going straight to the Logan's Run argument, but you haven't let up. Frankly, viruses that single out the old and infirm are a good thing. Your perception of the cost being marginal ignores the significant cost the elderly and infirm take on the economy and society by merely existing.
It's not that I want people "to die".
I acknowledge that everything that is born is ordained to die from its inception. The trouble is greed and fear. People greedily cling to life valuing quantity over quality.
How many billions do we collectively spend every year so that people can eke out another year of suffered existence, driven simply by greedy love of existence or fear of the inevitable? How much else could be done with those resources?
There was a time, not so long ago, when pneumonia was regarded as the friend of the elderly. Of all the ways to die of age (bearing in mind that everything does die) it is one of the swiftest and least painful; it's not a lingering death.
Just as we don't squander organ transplants on people over a certain age (it depends on the organ and the country but generally past 60 the only organ you might get is a kidney), I don't think we should squander one penny dealing with respiratory illness, unless it's a disease that hits the young and healthy hard (like spanish flu).