A Doctor's Thoughts on Antibiotics, Expiration Dates

Survival Blog ^ | 7/26/10 | Dr. Bones

[Kartographer]

As a recently-retired physician who is married to a nurse-midwife, my preparedness group looks to us as the post-TEOTWAWKI hospital and medical staff. Medical progress has been exponential and even just the last decade of scientific breakthroughs can equal a century of improvement in medical treatments, surgical techniques and pharmaceuticals. However, in the years (months?) ahead, the crumbling of the infrastructure and devolution of society in general will very likely throw us back to a medical system that existed in the 19th Century.

Let’s take an example: When the U.S. was a young nation, the average woman could expect to be pregnant 10-12 times during her reproductive lifetime (no reliable means of birth control). One out of four women would not survive the pregnancy, either from issues relating to blood loss from miscarriage or childbirth or Infection (no antibiotics) following same. A myriad of other complications occurred which are treatable today but weren’t back then. I collect old medical books, and even relatively modern obstetric textbooks devoted entire chapters on how to crush a fetus’ skull in order to expedite its removal from a critically ill mother, with instruments that clearly had no other purpose. When childbirth was successful, she could expect perhaps 3-4 of her children to survive to become adults, on average, with many minor children succumbing to simple infections that had no known effective treatment at the time.

This is the grim reality that we, in modern times, will face when the inevitable happens and current medical technology and treatments are unavailable to us.

[B4Ranch]

Whatever you say. That’ll be just fine with me. You eat the way you want to and I’ll eat the way I want.

I am not going to attempt to explain the benefits of magnesium and trace minerals to an educated fella such as yourself.

[B4Ranch]

Lots of us can taste the differences between natural food and the processed chemical stuffed items.

[JRandomFreeper]

If you eat a balanced diet, you get those trace elements, including magnesium.

Without relying on your salt to provide them. Go figure.

Sodium chloride, you need in bulk, not trace.

That's the reason that the human race has been so mad for it for oh... what... tens of thousands of years?

If you want to talk about fractions of a percent... I understand your phobia and fetish...

Me? We've got 7 billion people on the planet that need to be fed. Don't be picky.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

Yes, it is also pre digested which is why you can’t give it to infants.

Mother's milk, however, is not pre digested, or anything. It's fancy sweat.

Honey is sexual exudations from plants, desparate to mate, that fake bees out.

Beer is yeast piss.

The mental gyrations the food fetishists have to go through is amazing.

/johnny

[little jeremiah]

I eat only food I prepare, from basic ingredients, mostly organic if I can get them. I buy grains, legumes, dried fruit, etc in bulk. Simple food. It’s made a vast difference in health, along with some other measures. People can pooh pooh natural food but if they try eating that way for some months or a year, they won’t believe the difference.

[JRandomFreeper]

Try eating off the land for 2 years.

Try not going to the grocery store for a couple of months (just finished one of those stints).

Get back with me, hero, about your natural foods.

It's easy to be a picky bitch when you have it around. Later, when it's beans and rice and lard... again... you learn some things.

/johnny

[driftdiver]

My first introduction to natural foods and ‘herbal’ treatments was when I lived in South Korea. 5000 years of learning on the benefits of different foods, plants, herbs and so forth. Many people there have started eating the ‘western’ way and their cancer rates are increasing.

[little jeremiah]

A. I”m not a hero (or rather, heroine).

B. I’m not telling anyeone else how they should eat or not eat.

C. I don’t know why you are so nasty, I didn’t say you are wrong or should change or anything else to attack you.

D. The point I made is that actual food, meaning grains, legumes, milk, and produce grown without pesticides/herbicides, is healthier than pre-packaged pre-prepared “food” that has lists of weird chemical ingredients.

But if people want to eat that, it’s their free will.

I buy 25 pound bags of rice, millet, buckwheat, lentils, oatmeal, mung beans, garbanzo beans and that kind of stuff and cook it and eat it. Is this somehow being a “bitch”? I can’t grow that - I have 5 acres covered with tall fir trees with hard clay/rock soil. Just trying to fell enough trees and improve the soil to grow a few greens is my concern. I can’t grow grains.

I think you have a burr under the saddle or something.

[little jeremiah]

It’s that way in many countries. In Western Samoa (at least last I heard) the people lived and ate very similarly to their ancestors, with good health. In American Samoa they’re all on food stamps, drink sodas instead of green coconut water (which is far tastier), eat McDonalds, and they’re fat as huge hogs and unhealthy.

[MD Expat in PA]

The farm you describe is not a ‘traditional farm’ and you know it. Check your email, if you would.

I checked my mail and since you seem to be implying that I am lying here are some pics of the farm mentioned in my previous post:

This is not a big "commercial" farming operation by any definition. I can’t say for sure but I would think it reasonable to believe that, like a lot of small farmers, that the dad in this family probably holds a non-farm job, that the wife and kids help out quite a bit. This farm is not very big BTW, evidenced by the aerial view, most of the crops grown surrounding the small dairy operation, are feed corn, alfalfa and soy beans. This Google Street View is more than a few years old and the farm house renovations have been completed for quite some time. But this farm, BTW is not at all unlike many other family farms in Lancaster County PA, except that these cows are confined to a small barn and barn yard very close to the road and they have no pasture to graze in unlike a somewhat bigger family farm just up the road. And BTW, I should clarify that I did not intend to imply that this farm was doing anything wrong in how they farm or raise their cows, my point was that, knowing and seeing that farming is not a “pristine” germ free environment, even if it is “organic” and probably especially if it is “organic”, that things like pasteurization and the availability of antibiotics is for the most part a very good thing.

You’d be surprised at the number of ranchers and farmers who grow organic for themselves while raising standard for the business. This has been going on for over fifty years that I know of. When Mom decides that those cows are no longer welcome in her kitchen, it does cause an uproar. All it takes is for the fish to die in the pasture ponds after one application of the latest and greatest fertilizers being pushed in the trade magazines.

I think you are full of it. Are you saying that a large number of farmers and ranchers and their families only eat “organically” grown food and “organic” free range, etc., meats while feeding the rest of us “poisons”?

I don’t know any country folks that don’t use Heritage seeds in the family garden. Monsanto is not a welcome name in their kitchens.

Again, I think you are full of it. That’s not to say that some farmers don’t plant “heritage” seeds in their kitchen gardens’ but that’s not because they think what they are growing for sale is unhealthy. BTW a lot of people think that when they see those seed signs along the roads in front of crop fields that means it is a corporate farm – nothing is farther from the truth.

http://agricultureproud.com/2012/08/06/do-farm-signs-mislead-customers-what-else-are-we-missing/

Back in the good old days, we used root cellars and canning to save our soft vegetables and fruits throughout the winter months. The meat was killed after the deep freeze began and hung in the coolers to keep the freeze burn off of it. .. The cattle were fed corn silage and hay during the winter months. The chickens were mostly in the cooler wrapped in cotton sacks.

Once again, you prove you know not of what you speak. Root cellars were and are meant to store “root vegetables”, potatoes, turnips, onions, carrots, beets, and even cabbage, and hard fruits like apples, etc., hence the name “root cellar”. Root cellars were “cool” and with low humidity that help preserve stored foods longer but not “soft” vegetables and fruit as you claim, and they were nothing like the modern refrigeration/freezers we have now. And as far as hanging meat in the winter months in ““coolers” to keep the freezer burn off of it”, again, you have no idea what you are talking about. Unless the farmer lived in a part of the country were the winter temperature never get’s above freezing (parts of Alaska, North Dakota, etc.), and since “root cellars” do not get that cold, otherwise they’d destroy the root vegetables and “canned” stuffs stored in them, meats were salt cured and or smoked to preserve them during the long winter months.

http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/build-root-cellar/

The salt was sea salt and the sugar was natural not processed.

“All “Natural” Sea salt” is a rather recent and trendy foodie product and for the most part and is mostly overpriced being that sea salt and mined salt is still sodium chloride, chemically no different, and most of the salt used by the American Pioneers was mined and did not come from the sea as the process for extracting salt from sea water is much more expensive that simply mining it.

As far as sugar, please take some time to read up on your history. Sugar cane was a very important commodity and export from the New World and sugar has been “processed” for a very long time. If you take the time to look at authentic recipes from the American and Colonial and Pioneer eras you will see that processed sugar was indeed used and that early American and pioneer general stores sold processed sugar, although it was somewhat expensive. Less processed forms of sugar like molasses were used because they were cheaper and honey was used because it was available if one kept bees or one was brave enough to raid a beehive but that was more out of necessity and the need to economize more so than any sort of idea that “processed As far as sugar, please take some time to read up on your history. Sugar cane was a very important commodity and export from the New World and sugar has been “processed” for a very long time. If you take the time to look at authentic recipes from the American and Colonial and Pioneer eras you will see that processed sugar was indeed used and that early American and pioneer general stores sold processed sugar, although it was somewhat expensive. Less processed forms of sugar like molasses were used because they were cheaper and honey was used because it was available if one kept bees or one was brave enough to raid a beehive but that was more out of necessity and the need to economize more so than any sort of idea that “processed” sugar was “bad”.

[MD Expat in PA]

Did it ever cross your mind that when you eat genetically modified foods you will also have genetically modified bacterias that your auto immune system hasn’t the slightest idea how to fight?

Monsanto and their “God, Move Over” stance” is not something I admire.

There is no evidence what so ever that GMO foods are the cause of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, and BTW, we humans have been genetically modifying foods; plants and animals ever since we very long ago figured out how to cross breed strains; if you don’t think the so called “heritage” seeds so prized by the “organic” “whole food” and “natural” crowd, didn’t come from previously “genetically modified” strains via cross breeding and forced and guided “natural selection” over many years of farming and experimentation and some trial and error, you are really kidding yourself. If we today relied solely on the strains of grains and other food crops as they existed many millenniums ago, the reality is that most of our ancestors would have starve to death and a lot of us would not be alive today.

The overuse and misuse of antibiotics is a whole other topic for discussion but this has little if nothing to do with what happened to the gal from GA. The microbes that invaded her body are not the result of “franken-food” – they are in fact, while rate, are very ancient. Ironically Aimee Copeland was a big believer in “holistic and natural medicine” and initially refused pain medications due to her personal convictions, that was until the pain got so bad that she saw the need for non-holistic pain management like modern pharmaceutical pain relievers like painkillers like morphine and Fentanyl.

[diamond6]

bttt

[B4Ranch]

This dairy farm is the classic picture of a family farmer losing ground. He’s probably sold his pasture lands to a neighbor and became a feed farmer. The herd’s medical costs are probably chewing holes in his pockets.

My grandfather had a two level root cellar. The temperature difference between the two levels was at least 20 degrees during the winter months. In the winter the top level would freeze everything solid, then he would lower it about10 feet and cover everything with hay. That cooler kept all the meats frozen.

On the other side of the mound was the “vegetable “ entrance where the potatoes, carrots, etc. and canned foods were kept. There was also a door where you could access the meat cooler.

The only meat I recall him smoking was bacon and some larger cuts of pork. Everything went in the cooler when he was done smoking it. I recall racks of venison and beef ribs hanging from a cross beam. The only food that I can remember my grandmother not having during the colder winter months was fish and salads.

White sugars were not available in her kitchen when I was a kid. You could get them in town. Molasses, honey and brown sugar was all that she had.

Now keep in mind they did not have an electric refrigerator or a water heater. These were country folks who had an outhouse and who bathed in a bin next to the kitchen wood stove. I was probably 8 or 9 when the power company wired up electricity poles to the house. The next few years, my granddad added on a bath room with a flushing toilet and a bathtub. He didn’t put in the sink for a few more years. Too expensive? Then he plumbed the kitchen and during that month GE came out with a small refrigerator that he could afford and the ice man lost another customer.

All these conveniences were available in town. Evidently you lived a much different life than I did.

Yes, I do know ranchers today who will not eat their own beef because of the “medicines” that are in fertilizers for the hay they buy for winter feed. They absolutely hate Monsanto and everything the company stands for but they’re caught between a rock and hard spot. No, I am not going to debate this issue with you so don’t bother to write a long rant.

Sit down and have a talk with an rancher and ask him what his father’s annual medicine costs were per 100 units. You might be shocked to learn that they didn’t spend $4 per unit, a cow and her calf during the average year. The water was cleaner, the soil too, natural fertilizers were used and so naturally the cows were healthier than this bunch we have these days. They weren’t quite as heavy but they were healthier.

[PatriotGirl827]

bookmark

[yorkiemom]

pages not found....

[Kartographer]

Odd, let me see what happened.

[Kartographer]

Try this:

http://www.survivalblog.com/2010/07/a_doctors_thoughts_on_antibiot.html

[Kartographer]

This is useful link:

Fish Antibiotics in a Collapse by Dr Bones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhKNZInFvpQ

[yorkiemom]

that worked! thx

[gundog]

No script...and the link at Post 24 is to folks that ship fast, fast, fast.