we should not expect antibiotics for colds, sore throats, runny nose, sinus headaches, etc....
but we do...and many demand it or its the fault of the mean old doctor who "didn't do anything"....
its the same problem with the overuse of opioids and the resultant abuse....
Americans in particular think everything is solved by a pill....
heck look at Viagra.....Viagra for old men who normally would have lost that function years ago NATURALLY but we can't accept natural aging anymore...
This is apples and oranges and pears and grapenuts.
The issue with antibiotics is that their casual use selects for the resistant strains in the general population, which then become predominate, ( according to this logic ) and the casually used antibiotic becomes ineffective.
I don’t think this line of reasoning applies to the other examples you mention. Correct me if I’m wrong ... and I mean that sincerely!
History lesson is in order:
Overuse of Antibiotics
From the very beginning the sense that antibiotics were risk-free led to overuse and abuse. Leighton Cluff, testifying before the US Senate in 1967, stated that “drugs are used excessively by the public and are prescribed excessively by physicians,” and that this “excessive and indiscriminate use,” especially of antibiotics, should be curtailed: “In the surveillance of the use of antibiotics at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the months of December and January it is not at all uncommon for forty percent of the patients in the hospital to receive at least one antibiotic, and it is inconceivable to me, because one of my major interests is infection, to believe that forty percent of the patients in the hospital require an antimicrobial drug, so that in this instance I think that there is no question but that these drugs are being used excessively. It is not at all uncommon for a physician in practice to administer penicillin, for example, or any other antimicrobial drug to patients with viral respiratory disease when it is patently clear from the scientific literature that this is absolutely of 110 value.”73
In 1972 US authorities certified twenty-four tons of the eight most commonly used antibiotics—enough to treat two illnesses of average duration for each man, woman, and child in the country, whereas the average individual suffers from such an illness about once in five or ten years. Between 1960 and 1970 the production of antibiotics for medicinal purposes increased 320 percent.74
By the late 1970s up to fifty tons of penicillin were being sold in the United States each year; one person in every’ four was taking it, and ninety percent of this use was a waste.75 In this decade Americans were consuming ten to twenty thousand tons of aspirin every year as well.76
In 1973 Calvin Kunin concluded that nine physicians in ten will prescribe a drug for a patient with the “common cold”; sixty percent of the prescriptions will be for antibiotics, such as tetracycline or penicillin, which are of 110 use in the “common cold”; and over half of the hospital patients receiving antibiotics either showed no evidence of infection or received the wrong medicine.77
A 1976 federally funded study of antibiotic use in Pennsylvania hospitals announced that surgery patients were being routinely given these substances for days after their operations, as a prophylactic measure, and that this irrational use accounted for one-fifth of the hospitals’ antibiotic consumption.78
Overall, one-third of patients in US hospitals receive a course of antibiotic treatment, accounting for up to twenty percent of all new and refill prescriptions.79
Careless prescribing is often exacerbated by incorrect diagnosis. A 1972 analysis of a thousand patient records in Ohio hospitals found that 340 received antibiotic treatment: the prescription was justified in only thirteen percent of the cases, questionable in twenty-one percent, and entirely irrational in the remaining sixty-six percent.80
Antibiotic therapy is common in chronic bronchitis, and yet the death rate in England from this condition was the same in
1970 as in 1935. A trial was done on two groups of patients, one given physical therapy and bronchial dilators, the other given antibiotics as well:
We found that there wasn’t much difference in recovery and mortality rates of the two groups. This sort of evidence makes me worried as to whether antibiotic therapy is a very good thing in chronic bronchitis.—Owen L. Wade, 197 l81
The physician may prescribe an antibiotic rather than refine his diagnosis. Kunin observed in 1973: “The ready availability of the new agents ... has changed the approach of physicians to the care of desperately ill patients. This change in practice also affects the care of patients with only minimal infection or in whom infection is only threatened. The physician, desiring to provide his patient with the very best in modern care, and separated from an effective diagnostic bacteriologic laboratory system, has resorted to overuse of these powerful and expensive agents. He is now resorting more and more to the drugs of fear, agents that help him resolve his fear of failing to give his patient what he believes is the very best drug. But, if he were willing and able to perform and properly interpret a few simple tests ... and if he recognized the limitations of antibiotics, the possibility of failure would be greatly lessened, and the patient would be spared toxic hazards and unnecessary expense.”82 And the US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner noted a year later: “As long as the treatment of disease is as nonspecific as it is, I think we are going to continue to overuse antibiotics.”83
Indeed, stated Paul Stolley and Louis Lasagna in 1969, since a GP cannot usually establish the diagnosis at the first visit, a prescription given at this time will be “based on a hunch, on in-
tuition, on the balance of probability, and on experience rather than on established certainty.”84
A particular source of concern is the “prophylactic” use of antibiotics—to compensate for unhygienic conditions or just on general principles:
Antibiotic prophylaxis against the bacterial world at large is not practical and, in fact, may induce more infection than it aims to prevent ... [It] does little more than ensure that the superimposed infections will be resistant to the antibiotics used. One survey showed that two-thirds of all patients who were admitted, exclusive of the obstetric and newborn services, received antibiotics, most of which were given prophy-lactically before operations. In another study, bacterial complications in clean operations were five times higher in prophylactically treated patients than in patients not given antibiotics prophylactically ... Prophylaxis is often used but is not only valueless, but also sometimes dangerous in viral infections, routine preoperative or postoperative care, comatose patients, bulbar poliomyelitis, tracheotomized patients, very ill patients with noninfectious diseases, and patients receiving steroid therapy.—B. M. Kagan et al., 197385
http://vaksinite.info/divided%20legacy.html#bookmark164
The only question remaining now is this: Who do you trust now?
For common cold take oil of oregano and colloidal silver. You can get both at the health food store. If you start taking oil of oregano at the first sign of a cold it will either stop it from progressing or greatly shorten it. Its a strong anti viral. Colloidal silver acts as an antibiotic.