Step aside medicine men, palliative caregivers, ritual healers, bush meat hunters (and eaters), because modern medicine and factory farmed chickens are here to save the day.
Oh, but not so fast.
As a species, we are always on the lookout for some exploitative loophole in nature, some shortcut to free ourselves from this mortal coil.
For time out of mind, we have chased this grail to the ends of the earth.
Remember, it was dreams of immortality and a fountain of youth that brought 16th century explorer Juan Ponce de León to the Florida swamplands. Of course, no such spring of life existed and Ponce de León returned empty handed. Well, not quite: He and his fellow conquistadors brought syphilis back to Europe. It seems that with every push forward, some unforeseeable force invariably pushes back.
Evolutionary biologists refer to it as the Red Queen Hypothesis, taken from the Queen’s line in Lewis Carroll’s, “Through the Looking-Glass,” “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Locked in this arms race against our pathogens and microbes, we are seemingly sprinting forward, but, in reality, only moving at a snail-like speed.
We have developed extraordinary remedies to fatal illnesses like scarlet fever and pneumonia, along with those for many skin and sinus infections. Penicillin alone, the first antibiotic, has saved incalculable lives.
No doubt antibiotics have saved millions of people, but doctors’ increasingly bad prescribing habits—treating antibiotics as an indiscriminate magic pill—are creating new and catastrophic, biologically mutant diseases, far more resistant to antibiotics and increasingly dangerous. Indeed, antibiotics are just another step in our search for a magic pill—our version of Ponce de León’s fountain of youth.
Western medicine has treated antibiotics as a panacea for many health issues, leading to a skyrocketing amount of them used by developed countries. Antibiotics have even been prescribed in situations where they wouldn’t necessarily be effective, such as when a patient is plagued by a viral infection, like bronchitis or influenza, as opposed to a bacterial infection.
This professional behavior and the over-exposure to antibiotics has given bacteria the time and ability to continually adapt with numerous minuscule restructurings, eventually leading to a resistant form that the antibiotic is unable to eradicate.
This past February, the World Health Organization published a report stating its concerns with the unprecedented rise in antimicrobial resistance, illustrating a serious issue: Many bacterial diseases are changing at an alarming and fatal rate. The WHO studies deal most directly with the carbapenem class of antibiotics, considered an especially potent group that is generally only used as a last resort.
Additionally, the CDC has published its own concerns, which have prompted an international effort to synthesize a new class of antibiotics, with many countries donating billions of dollars to fund research. However, the research has proved to be relatively futile.
The global consequences are clear: We now have serious superbugs that are incredibly resistant to modern medicine and must be addressed in new ways. Some health experts, including Britain’s Chief Medical Officer Sally C. Davies, say that drug resistant pathogens pose as much of an imminent threat as terrorism. This makes it abundantly clear that we need to address the crisis of overprescription immediately.
The specific issue lies in the very philosophy of Western medicine. Instead of working to extirpate the causes of disease, like unsanitary living conditions, contaminated food or water, high levels of stress, we focus on the Band-Aid fixes.
The path is simple: The social determinants that affect human health must be addressed, before individualizing and patching up particular cases. Firstly, we must curb the reckless prescribing practices that plague our hospitals and doctor offices across the country. Doctors must be rehabilitated—weaned of this antibiotic prescription fever.
Moreover, it is imperative that we increase public funding for palliative care and ensure that all individuals have basic access to the needs we view as so fundamental to life: uncontaminated food and clean water, shelter, and education.
The French philosopher and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that civilization itself was the real culprit when it came to the ills that plague society. May his prophecies be wrong.
If healthcare practices are not subjected to radical changes in the coming years, we stand to face a new series of disastrous pathogens, like those experienced by Europeans following the age of the New World exploration.
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