Drug Resistance—The Twilight of Antibiotics?

by Heidi Stevenson

13 April 2010

Drug resistance is becoming pandemic. Gonorrhea is rapidly approaching the point of being untreatable. Tuberculosis has been there for years. New types are emerging constantly. Are we entering the twilight of the antibiotic age?

Pharmaceutical companies are showing little interest in developing new varieties of antibiotics to replace the old ones that are rapidly becoming useless. You'd have thought that their rapacious quest for profits would have them scrambling to find new drugs to replace the old, but it's not happening. The only explanation can be that they're reaching the end of the line in the search for new molecules to replace the old—that their bag of tricks is nearly empty.

The only conclusion is that modern medicine's approach to health is leading to a dead end. The Medical Paradigm Is Fatally Flawed. What's wrong? More important, what should you do about it?

Antibiotics seemed to be a miracle. They rapidly killed bacteria associated with disease. Symptoms disappeared. People believed they'd been healed. What could possibly be wrong with that?

What's Wrong?

Secondary Answer

The secondary answer is overuse. Doctors were able to treat diseases when, previously, they'd only been able to watch and wait. Of course, that's not what they usually did. Medical history is replete with horrific treatments that made patients sicker. Whenever an idea caught on, it was pushed to the extreme. Bloodletting was done until there was almost no blood left for the heart to pump. Laxatives were used until the poor patient's bowels were evacuated in an uncontrollable and burning rush, and then they were repeated.

Treatments were presumed to be effective, for whatever reason some doctor thought he'd seen a benefit. Then they were pushed and pushed and massively overused. A few doctors would became disgusted and start preaching of the immense harm being done. However, they were treated as heretics.

Nothing has changed in mainstream medicine. For any benefit gained by antibiotics, all the harm done was ignored. Not only that, but doctors repeated history. They threw them at everything—and they ignored the fact that drug resistance was noted within a few months of the first uses of the first antibiotic, penicillin.

Antibiotics were given to people with colds—and still are—in spite of the fact that they could do nothing for a virus. They were given as a prophylactic to prevent infection—and still are. Antibiotics and antiviral drugs and antifungal drugs and anti-inflammatories and anti-whatever you can imagine drugs were handed out like candy on the flimsiest of excuses—and still are.

In spite of drug resistance being a known concern from the earliest days of antibiotics, these drugs have been massively overused.

Primary Answer

A primary concept of mainstream medicine is an even more significant concern than drug overuse. Symptoms are not disease. They are the body's means of healing disease.

Fever is the obvious example. It's a brilliant way to eliminate unwanted pathogens, by effectively burning them out. Even now, doctors routinely tell parents to cool their children's fevers—by using, of course, drugs with potentially injurious effects. Except when a fever is so high that it's harmful, it's obvious that suppressing it conflicts with healing. Yet, that's exactly what doctors are doing every day.

Antibiotics suppress the body's attempts to heal. In cases where a person's life is at risk—and all other options have failed—it might make sense to throw an antibiotic at an illness. However, when antibiotics and other drugs are the first thing a doctor reaches for, the human body is prevented from using its own resources to fight illness.

The result has been the loss of people's ability to take care of themselves. Immune systems cannot develop. They're counteracted every time they try to act. Antibiotics, vaccines, and other drugs have circumvented nature.

Antibiotics' day is rapidly approaching nightfall. Circumventing nature may have a place when all else has failed—but as a first resort, it's clearly a failed paradigm.

What Should You Do About It?

Modern medicine has done its utmost to convince people that they should run to the doctor for every little sniffle. Things that were once considered routine are now treated as life-threatening. The result has obviously not been to our benefit. Chronic disease is rampant. Conditions once so rare that they were virtually unheard of, such as type 2 diabetes in children, have become common. We are already suffering the ill effects of modern medicine's madness.

The obvious response is to avoid modern medicine's techniques unless absolutely necessary. We've succombed to the lure of an easy way out of disease by accepting routine vaccinations. We've come to believe that we can mistreat our bodies, and when they break down, just run to the doctor for a pick-me-up.

Worse, we've become convinced that health is something that comes in a pill. Obviously, it isn't. Health isn't created by chemicals that are foreign to our bodies. Health doesn't come from chemicals that mimic natural substances. Health isn't imposed. It's created by our own actions, and when we're sick, by allowing our bodies to do what they're so well designed for: healing.

Drug-resistant bacteria have come with diseases worse than the ones they're replacing. Did flesh-eating bacteria exist before antibiotics? Perhaps—but now they're becoming common. The result of reliance of antibiotics is worse diseases than existed before. This is where the hubris inherent in the medical paradigm has led us.

We've allowed ourselves to be lulled by a promise of health in a pill. The advent of drug-resistant bacteria is a modern disaster that cannot be fixed. The parade of new chemicals to replace the ones outcompeted by bacteria, viruses and fungus is coming to an end.

It's time to face reality. We must take our health into our own hands. There are no shortcuts. Health comes from good food, exercise, a good environment, and good social relations. Good living through chemistry is a sham.

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