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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20702 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.

This doesn't work because 1) stupid people will ask for antibiotics when they don't have good reason to expect them to work, and 2) giving out unneeded antibiotics has bad externalities. And the pharmacist can't administer a stupidity test.

And even in your case, you say that one doctor gave you a useless antibiotic before the second doctor gave you a useful one. If you go to a pharmacist, how are either you or the pharmacist going to know which one is useful and which one isn't? How are either of you going to know that your condition needs antibiotics at all, aside from you getting lucky? ("It worked for my family member, so it should work for me", and that actually being true, is luck.)

Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?

Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.

My read is that when antibiotic resistance becomes a big problem, we will have plenty of warning because it'll be STD's and hospital caused infections first(and neither of those are a huge problem for normal healthy people), and also that there's lots of antibiotics to cycle through before we start needing to invent new ones. I invite doctors on the motte to chime in, of course, but that kinda points to it being a problem we don't need to be quite so vigilant about.

There's an additional discussion that the most common forms of antibiotic resistance seem to be otherwise fitness reducing; when bacteria need to compete without antibiotic pressure, the non-antibiotic resistant variant usually wins. Seems like it's some sort of limiting factor outside of, again, STDs and hospital caused infections, which don't have as much of a reservoir.

I'm pretty sure that community-originated antibiotic resistance is a myth kept up mostly to have a gotcha for anyone who wants to end the prescription monopoly, or just generally legalize drugs. The vast majority of the dangerous antibiotic-resistant strains are hospital-originated.

I was under the impression that agricultural use (misuse?) was one of the biggest sources of antibiotic-resistant strains

As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.

Nuking your microbiome for no reason with unnecessary antibiotics every time you have a sniffle is a bad thing for you personally even if the Chinese are doing it too.

Also, statistically, a bad thing for everyone else because it promotes antibiotic resistance.

The poster’s point was that China, India, Brazil don’t need American help to develop antibiotic resistant strains

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