Meds To Cure (or Harm) The World

America has created wonder drugs for the world.

Then it rendered them unusable.

Both antibiotics and corticosteroids are not what they once were.

Fleming may have been standing in the British empire in 1928 when he noticed that something from penicium (common bread mold) could stop the growth of bacteria within a circle around it.

We could not have expected the poor guy to know then that those little bacteria-beasties would fight back, with tooth and nail if they only had them.  The creation of resistance to antibiotics by bacteria has been powerful enough to fuel a multibillion dollar drug industry to making more effective (and expensive) antibiotics. It has fueled patients into asking for antibiotics for colds caused by viruses, which don’t respond to antibiotics anyway.

This has led to the (woman) doctor who heads the World Health Organization into asserting that within 2 years a person will be able to die from an infection caused by a scrape of the knee.  About 1930, a collaboration of the Mayo Clinic with a group in Zurich learned that extracts from the adrenal gland could bring down inflammation like nobody’s business.

“I hear they bring down swelling like magic,” said lots of patients. One who said that verbatim was my own mother of blessed memory, who banged her elbow in a minor fender-bender type accident. In the 50’s, our proud-to be-up-to-date general practitioner gave her an injection in the elbow. I got one in my bottom to to end a whole season of yuck allergy symptoms.

Then they started seeming troublesome. Stopping them too quickly seemed to create rebound swelling and pain.  Taking them too long seemed to create a propensity for infection.  These problems seem to have led first to the development of protocs to wean folks off these and/or minimize the doses. Since then, it has led to the development of non-steroidal anti-inflamatories, which can be tough on the digestive system and especially the liver when used chronically.

It is to the point that when I suggested to a highly intelligent mother that a referal for a (likely brief course) of antibiotics could actually help her son with a serious medical problem, she recoiled in horror.

She is a highly educated woman, knowledgeable about the ways of both mainstream and alternative treatment, and was already inquiring about alternatives.