Finally an article that talks about bacterial resistance and mentions the *real* reason bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to known medications — because it’s not profitable to develop new ones!

I’m so tired of doctors getting thrown under the bus for ‘over prescribing’ antibiotics — hog wash! Any good doctor knows that if a patient is very ill with a respiratory infection, there’s *no way* to be 100% sure if it’s viral or bacterial until cultures come back—and even then cultures don’t alway catch the pathogen in question, for various reasons.

So if a doctor has a very sick patient, and they decide it’s a virus — which is a guess — and it might be the right guess 80% or 90% or even 99% of the time —

But the problem is when it’s the wrong guess, and now the patient has sepsis where a simple course of Zithromax or Levoquin might have prevented that problem —

How can a good doctor live with that?! It’s not just a simple ‘opps’, it’s a major failure of what basic medical care could have cured, but what, the doctor didn’t prescribe it, because maybe, might, one day develop a super bug?

What about the value of taking care of the patient in front of you?

I am **living proof** that a patient can be on *long term* antibiotic therapy and *not* develop a super bug.

And me—with a compromised immune system—if I’m not developing a super bug, then super bugs are not being created by doctors over prescribing antibiotics as some people want the public to believe.

(It doesn’t mean that I won’t develop a super bug one day, but after mostly an entire lifetime of antibiotics, to one degree or another, and 13+ years of iv antibiotics (for different reasons), if I develop a super bug now it definitely wouldn’t be any doctor’s fault. I’ve been a Petri dish in motion for a long time, and god knows if doctors hadn’t prescribed all of these antibiotics I would have been long time ago dead.)

Even if a patient only has a severe viral infection — antibiotics are *still* warranted to prevent the patient from developing a secondary bacterial infection while they’re fighting the virus and their immune system is down.

(Which is *exactly* what they think made the 1918 flu virus so deadly—it wasn’t the virus itself, it was the secondary bacterial infections that went along with it. Infections now that could be ‘treated’—but they can only be ‘treated’ if the physician understands (and isn’t shamed) into prescribing preventive antibiotics when a patient has a serious respiratory viral infection — and shaming is happening dangerously too often these days.)

Well, finally an article that nailed the problem — that it isn’t profitable to develop new antibiotics, so we the tax payers need to start government programs to do it for us.

We shouldn’t be letting people suffer unnecessarily — and encouraging doctors into forcing patients to suffer unnecessarily —- because of a problem that needs to be solved by new advances in medicine — and if we have to step up and fund it, then we need to step up and find it before these super bugs become common place.

But risking people’s lives for what a simple course of oral antibiotics could have solved?

That’s sociopathic. And cruel. And a failure of the basic code of medical ethics.

And we should be ashamed for every once promoting the philosophy of ‘overprescribing’ into the minds of the people who are supposed to be helping us — our physicians.

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A man in the U.K. got a case of ‘super-gonorrhea’ — are you at risk too?

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/man-uk-got-worlds-first-super-gonorrhea-risk-164950393.html