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Well, well here we go again. A new story really shows the double-edged sword that the prescribing of antibiotics indiscriminately has become. How’s “terrifying”?

In a recent study published in the Lancet researchers were shocked to find that the resistance to one week of antibiotic therapy lasted for 6 months in patients.

In one of the better more understandable write-ups on this study is today’s Globe and Mail, Feb. 09/07, by Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press.

Some snippets from her article –

“Senior author Dr. Herman Goossens said he and his co-authors assumed that if they followed the subjects in their study for six months they would see the rates of resistant bacteria in participants’ mouths return to normal levels. But that didn’t happen.

“We were pretty staggered by these data,” said Dr. Goossens, a microbiologist at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. “We never expected this.”

The finding, reported in the journal The Lancet, is a sharp reminder of the power of antibiotics, suggested Eric Brown, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton.

“So a quick course of antibiotics and a half a year later, you’re still carrying resistant organisms. That’s a little bit terrifying,” said Dr. Brown, whose laboratory is working on alternative ways to kill bacteria, because of the rising problem of antibiotic resistance.

“It . . . should serve as a wake up call for individual prescribing physicians, nurse practitioners, midwives, dentists and others that inappropriate use of antibiotics does have consequences,” said Dr. John Conly, former chair of the Canadian Committee on Antibiotic Resistance and head of the department of medicine at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary.” End quote.

Looks like the ‘Law of unintended consequences’ strike once again.

What happens when the ‘Medical Paradigm’, uses a nuclear bomb to kill a fly?

Infections are to be taken seriously, however, if physicians were trained in simple preventative and management techniques from Alternative Medicine they wouldn’t always have to rely on heroic ’search and destroy’ warfare.

Tons of antibiotics are prescribed for chronic ear infections in children, unfortunately even after a major study from ten years ago that discovered over 90% of these children were not suffering from bugs but from food allergy this information was ignored. They will in many cases suffer the ‘law’ as stated above, gut problems etc., from antibiotics down the road, and no one will realize the real culprit.

The ‘wake up call for individual prescribing physicians,’ etc., went out after this study and others but due to the ingrained prescribing patterns of overworked physicians they still over-prescribe these dangerous drugs over 10 years later or as if I can make the leap – from one MD above - “terrifying” drugs. So do you think this Lancet study will change your physicians prescribing habits when he/she is bombarded by drug companies promoting the latest so-called life-saving antibiotic?

These same physicians will continue to write millions of prescriptions of antibiotics for non-ear infections and thus cause more resistance despite the clear scientific literature to the contrary and set up children with potential health problems in the future due to the scary scenario described above.

There are appropriate occasions when antibiotics are needed but they are routinely over utilized. These same physicians ironically resisted, for over 20 years, prescribing antibiotics for ulcers because it didn’t make sense to them.

When it was discovered by Australian Physician Barry Marshall and his colleague (for which they shared a Nobel prize for medicine), that indeed stomach and duodenal ulcers were caused by the infectious bug h-pylori they were ignored by the Medical Establishment because of the ‘vested interests’, as pointed out by ABC’s 20/20 medical correspondent.

Physicians only started prescribing antibiotics for ulcers when the vested interests of different pharmaceutical companies with newer more expensive antibiotics began aggressively marketing to them. It certainly wasn’t due to the ‘medical scientific research data’ which sat on the dust bin for over 20 years. But that’s another story.

So don’t ‘hold your breath’ that the information from these researchers who ‘were pretty staggered by the data’, will make its way to your local physicians office any time soon.