theprof00 said:
well supposedly, in other countries antibiotics are available over the counter. I think such a move would probably save people a lot of time and money. |
The problem, especially with giving out antibiotics over the counter is that people will take it too often and not over long enough time periods.
This is a serious problem, as it breeds multiresistant bacteria cultures. This is a thing that is already happening because we feed antibiotics to our fatlings preemtively in order to save, you guessed it, time and money. These anti biotics get into the food chain with the meat as well. There's already several Antibiotics that have lost their effect almost completey because of over the counter antibiotics and animal antibiotics.
The problem is that Antibiotics are finite. We only know so many of them. If we reach the day when all our Antibiotics are failing we will be thrown back into the middle ages medicinally, because what it now a simple little infection, will kill you without them.
The Ideal procedure would actually be to test every singe patient for their specific gem stem and prescibe antibiotics based on that. The fact that your doctor actually tested you probably means that he is a very good, responsible Doctor. Way too many Doctors prescrible antibiotics too lightly.
Antibiotics are one of the most precious recurces we have right now, and saving you half an hour of your time and twenty bucks is not worth risking the health of millions, even if it might slightly inconvinience you right now.
