Quote Originally Posted by Miss Z View Post
Stunned? It's medical fact. Not like it's my opnion, or anything.

To echo ES, I don't understand how you don't know this if you indeed worked in a medical environment, but I'll explain it for you anyway.

Pathogens, bacteria in particular, undergo mutation in a number of their population. The change in their genotype may give them an immunity to the effects of a drug. Most of the time, it doesn't. But sometimes it does.

Under normal circumstances, i.e. without the presence of drugs, the typical strains and the mutated, resitant organism live alongside each other, in the ileum, for example. The strains compete with one another to survive. In these conditions, the resistant organism have no advantage over the typical strains, and it is highly likely that the resistant organism will die out. Thus, it's resistant gene is lost.

However, introduce a drug into the environment. All the typical strains are destroyed, but the resistant organism remains. It now has no competition and is able to reproduce quite happily, each of it's daughter cells carrying this saving grace gene. The drug administered is rendered useless against the pathogen. The pathogen spreads to other people and now we have nothing effective to fight it.

That is how natural selection works - a change in the environment favouring a particular genotype, causing extinction and evolution.

The more drugs that are being exposed to the pathogens, the better conditons we are providing for much more dangerous strains. Plus, many bacteria are able to exchange genetic information via plasmids, or indeed their own DNA, to other species of pathogen, so the resistance genes are not limited to only one condition.

An example? Staphylococcus aureus! S.Aureus is present in your respiratory system and on the surface of your skin right now. Occasionally, it will cause a mild throat infection. At first, we treated it with penicillin, as pencillin was the wonder, cure-all drug at that time. Before long, penicillin no longer worked. At that time, no one really knew why.

Then this condition was treated with methicillin. It was oversubscribed as people wanted to keep popping these pills everytime they felt a bit hoarse. So we get methicillin-resistant staphyloccocus aureus. The first MRSA.

So then we're in a bit of trouble, and combat MRSA with vancomycin. We can't find anything else to administer but vancomycin. The inevitable happens. Now the most dangerous form of MRSA is Multiple Resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

So, again, it is practically and morally wrong to oversubscribe drugs.
WTF, do you think that I would say I didn't understand the "natural" albeit drug "engineered", pathogens?

Duh, I could have given you the "Pathogens are for Dummies" spiel.


I was looking for YOUR spin on the morality and "practically" of over PRESCRIBING of drugs.


Do you mean it's practically immoral?


If it's immoral and unpractical to overprescribe drugs that cause mutating pathogens, next time you go to the doctor, tell him to shove the prescription.

--------------------------

I wonder what immorality and 'practically' the physician, who gave my mom chemo therapy in a last ditch effort to keep her alive, was trying to perpetrate on her being. As our esteemed president alluded to before?
He may have wanted to keep her alive so he could make more money.


One thing that people are very shy and ignorant about is asking what meds they are give post-office visit. The physician will ask you about what you are allergic, what meds you already take and then he will prescribe you a med as he sees fit.

Yes, some doctors will prescribe front line meds because they are wont to give out the generics bcause the pharm companies have them in their pockets.

LOLOLOL,

Ask a physician/doctor/surgeon how many people do not give a flying shiat about WHAT they are given to take for their ills.

Some of them ask about the cure/meds they saw on House or Scrubs.


You say Toe may toe, I say flesh eating bacteria, "Doctor, save my life".