How many types of medication are you on?

Deleted User wrote: »

It is only if you don't finish the prescription. No wonder MRSA is so prevalent when people are so uneducated about the risks.

That's only part of it. It's the massive overuse of antibiotics in the last 50 years that was just as much if not more of an issue. It's been fed to our farm animals, never mind us. It was released into the wild all over the place. The magic bullet that ricocheted back to hit us. Hence the bacteria built up resistance and not just the bacteria in us. The most likely place to pick one of these things up is in a hospital. They became breeding grounds for them when scrubbing the place down with carbolic was replaced by reliance on antibiotics.

--LOS-- wrote: »

You can build resistance to anti-biotics, it is the bacteria itself that builds resistance but the effect is the same. Dissecting the first part of that sentence is only a war of words.

Its not just a war of words, its knowledge as opposed to ignorance of the subject. An individual who never even sniffed an antibiotic in their lives could get a resistant infection. Indeed they could have resistant bacteria already present in their system. In their intestines or on their skin.

Other than that all I've said is that it is clearly not healthy to be taking medication flippantly and needlessly as many many people do.

I would agree and too many self medicate and sometimes with the help of doctors. I would also be of the opinion that the pill for every ill notion is still alive and well. We can blame the doctors and the manufacturers but it's also driven by the patients. "Doctor, little johnny has a bug(viral), give me an anitbiotic". "I'm fat, give me a pill for that". I hate my job, give me a pill for that". etc etc.

Now its just my humble on this, but I think we're storing up another big health issue down the line with the over prescription of anti depressant drugs. Like antibiotics, these drugs are incredibly useful tools to fight disease, but again IMHO we're using a similar scattergun approach. The amount of people I know on some form of "mothers little helper" is crazy. A year ago a study found that SSRI's were no better than placebo for mild depression. Of course the hippies were all agog about this, but neglected to mention that the same study found they were very useful tools for severe depression. The problem is we're firing these medications at those at the mild end of the spectrum. There are more cases of mild depression for a start and now there is a tendency to ascribe the depression label and medicate it in people that would have been out of the range before. People who would have been helped by other methods or would have righted themselves anyway. One article I read(new scientist I believe?) suggested that these drugs may even increase bipolar like symptoms in otherwise non bipolar individuals. It may be nothing and medical health experts reading this will think me loopy, but if I had said the same thing about antibiotics 30 years ago I would have gotten the same reaction.