Antibiotics for everything - good?

[GooseyLoosey]

On 2 recent occassions I have wondered about the prescription of antibiotics for my children.

On the first occassion one had an infected tear-duct. I had to take him to the doctors as nursery were worried it was contagious. Dr prescribed antibiotics. What happens if I just leave it to get better I asked - Dr looked shocked "Ummm don't really know, we never do that".

Second occasion was last week. Took ds as his excema was terrible. Now I just expected more cream but he was rescribed antibiotics. Why I asked? Well, some of it looks a bit infected I was told. I remember having infected cuts as a child and my grandmother using a poultice. I asked about this and was treated to the same look I would have got if I had asked if treating it by singing Jack and Jill backwards 3 times a day would work.

Have we lost sight of anyways to treat illness other than through drugs and is this a bad thing (I have visions of virulent drug resistent strains of bacteria taking over the world).

I do get a bit worried by this idea that doctors are giving out antibiotics too much. Obviously it happens, but eye infections are very bad things.
Doctors work on probabilities and consequences, even if the odds are 100 to one against it being something worth killing with a-bs the downside of an untreated infection in an eye is very deep.

A "poultice" ?
Actually this is a primitive form of antibiotic. You can produce slightly useful things by use of spit and rotten food, indeed the story goes that rotten food was the original source for penicillin.
I have (in theory) the knowledge of how to make a poultice. But I would no more apply it to a child than I would use cat food to treat an ulcer.

They work a bit, sort of it you do it right, and you don't have bacteria that are immune, and of course assuming the rotten stuff you put on your body doesn't send you into toxic shock.

My sister died of drug resistant bacteria, so yes, I see it as a genuine problem. However a major cause is not eye drops but farmers using it to cause cattle to put on weight.

OTOH My father had what today might be seen as such a minor condition that you might not see a doctor at all, and simply be given pills by a nurse. He had an infected finger.
They looked up "25 yo; male ; manual worker", and told him exactly when he was going to die.
Before a-bs we had huge amounts of data from watching people die because medical science simply couldn't touch many conditions, thus they cold make this prediction with quite scary precision. There is even a cliche from literature from about 1900 to almost the present day where only having a fixed amount of time to live is seen as a plausible thing, such was the frequency with which this happened.
My father was one of the first to get penicillin, and certain death simply went away.
I'm allergic to the stuff myself, and this certainly is not due to "over use", since they discovered this in 1961 when I was born late and got them at birth.

personally i hAve always found a pharamcist marvellous for helping with alteratives.- not to a drs opinion i hasten to add, just instead of going to the drs.

that's very interesting DC.

and very sad to hear about your sister.

Interesting DC and sad about your sister.

I of course gave antibiotics for eye infection and have not used poultice on ds (although I do have a pretty exact notion of what to do and the scientific basis for it).

I was questioning my bias against frequent use of antibiotics and wondering if it was founded in fact or prejudice. You seem to suggest it may in part be the latter and I accept your arguments as I have no facts of my own to counter them, does anyone else?

I know that many Dr's suggest eye drops for conjunctivitus & that over the last few years many Dr's have told me cool boiled water works just as well!