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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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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.

It's a real problem with research done on it - check out abx resistant in STDs (and by this I mean the details) MRSA vs. MSSA is a huge issue also.

We are in the growing warning stage with tons of money being pumped into avoiding the problem but as always man on the street won't notice until something boils over.

We have plenty of back up agents but often it means a switch to something less convenient, has worse side effects, or in the case with MRSA may result in increased sepsis fatality rates because of complicated things like time to static blood concentration, interaction with comorbid end organ dysfunction and other blah blah boring but important stuff.

Having an illness that goes from no big deal to no big deal but 1.2 out of 10k have a joint explode is not something the average person is going to notice but is an avoidable problem if idiots would stop pretending like they know everything and their doctors thousands of hours of education was meaningless.

Likewise you have stuff like some drug addict, illegal immigrant, or even just a regular person with the wrong insurance getting housed in the hospitals for 6 weeks because IV antibiotics is the only thing that works now instead of oral.

All these small things grow and contribute to the collapse of American healthcare.

In other countries rampant with problems (India, China) they just let people die a lot more. I'd like to keep our system.

Also hospital specific antibiotiograms are a thing.

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.

One of the most obvious examples if STDs, which is a known (and serious and growing) issue that's been magnified by homosexual sex norms (especially now that we have HIV medication).

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

A lot of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are resistant to antibiotics not used in agriculture.

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