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How Norway Fought Staph Infections
eldavojohn writes "Studies are showing that Norway's dirtiest hospitals are actually cleaner than most other countries', and the reason for this is that Norwegians stopped taking antibiotics. A number of factors like paid sick leave and now restrictions on advertising for drugs make Norway an anomaly when it comes to diseases like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). A Norwegian doctor explains, 'We don't throw antibiotics at every person with a fever. We tell them to hang on, wait and see, and we give them a Tylenol to feel better.' Norway is the most MRSA free country in the world. In a country like Japan, where 17,000 die from MRSA every year, 'doctors overprescribe antibiotics because they are given financial incentives to push drugs on patients.'"
Endure non-life-threatening illnesses without drugs, it helps you build an immune system. Taking drugs means your body never learns to fend for itself, like a spoiled brat.
While the doctors writing out scrips for antibiotics does play a role, one of the major factors should be patient education. A lot of people think that antibiotics should be used for minor complaints, such as colds. In addition, one major cause of superbugs is the failure of patients to complete a course of antibiotics. They feel better, so they simply stop taking the medications.
Firing Adrian Monk is exactly the opposite of how they conquered MRSA. Bleach and alcohol hand sanitizer wipes are much more powerful tools than penicillin and vancomycin. The idea is simple: bugs don't become superbugs if they are a) dead, or b) never exposed to agents which cause them to become superbugs.
This isn't to say antibiotics are a bad idea altogether. Just that they are very much over prescribed and that a much better way of dealing with an unknown infection is to watch it closely to see if it goes away on its own before you bring out the drugs. Of course, this flies directly in the face of capitalism where companies want to sell more drugs and create targets like superbugs that require ever more powerful drugs which can then be patented and used to essentially extort the life from people and governments; pay us or die... Ah, unintended side effects.
I can see it now: Method and process for reducing MRSA infections by not using drugs.
Don't even try it without paying.
I've heard a number of international folks complain that antibiotics are almost never prescribed in the UK and yet a number of UK hospitals have had MRSA outbreaks. Does anyone have a league table of the cleanliness of each country's hospitals?
It's a bit like a tragedy of the commons thing. In an aggregate level, it's better to take far less antibiotics. But for any individual it's more beneficial than not to take them for that individual.
So much of modern antibiotic use (at least in the U. S.) is hugely irresponsible. Doctors prescribe antibiotics not because they are necessary, but because they are heckled by patients who want a prescription to justify their trip to the doctor's office and because they are encouraged by pharmaceutical companies to move their products.
Anybody who knows anything about biochemistry and/or pharmaceuticals knows that novel drugs that are SAFE and EFFECTIVE are enormously expensive to develop and clinically test. It's idiotic to use these medical tools, which have finite effectiveness due to resistance development, unless they are truly necessary.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria develop their resistance at a cost - a resistant organism that can out-survive normal bacteria in the presence of antibiotics will probably die out in a normal environment if it hasn't already gained an overwhelming majority. The mutations that provide antibiotic resistance will, in most cases, make the organism less fit or efficient than an unresistant strain in an antibiotic-free environment. The fact that Norway's policies are working is partial proof of this.
In short, people are idiots and everyone should really be following the example the Norwegians have set here.
Clearly, it sounds like Norwegian hospitals are on the right track, with respect to antibiotic handling.
I would be interested to know, though, how much the favorable microbial climate there is due to medical attitudes toward antibiotic use, and how much comes down to antibiotic use(and ideally nonuse) in the agricultural sector. At least in the US, medical antibiotic misuse is quite visible, and makes for a good morality tale(lazy, impatient, whiny consumers demand quick fix, need to learn more patience); but most livestock are given a constant low dose of various antibiotics(pretty much the best scenario for antibiotic resistance) for most of their lives. Then they are chopped up and ground together, to spread anything that they might have evolved evenly through the food supply(and, since a fair few antibiotic-resistance adaptations occur on bacterial plasmids, rather than in their core genomes, they can spread from species to species pretty quickly).
The problem is comparatively invisible, since most people don't see what goes on inside the barn, while a great many doctors are more than happy to encourage(at least generally, if not always when they have a distressed parent and some crying sniffling baby to deal with) responsible antibiotic use; but over half of US-produced antibiotics go into livestock rather than humans(and the numbers might actually be worse than that sounds, since it could well be that bulk agricultural antibiotics are more likely to be produced in cheaper offshore locations than are the more heavily regulated, and more profitable, human ones).
It would be very interesting to know what the Norwegian agricultural sector is up to in this respect, and how much of an effect that has.
...because the dogbite was infected (as they usually are)?
And this is an exception to the rule. Another obvious exception is surgery, where antibiotics are used to prevent postoperative infections and organ rejection.
The idea is that your sniffles don't require azithromycin, that your cough and throat ache don't need penicillin, and that your fever doesn't need ampicillin.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Regular soap works just fine to get hands clean and get rid of most of the germs without speeding along the survival of the fittest contest among the bacteria.
On holiday in Malaysia my son was sick so we took him to a doctor. The doctor couldn't really do anything. My son was reacting to the climate and refusing to eat solids but he gave us a bottle of antibiotic dispensed from his surgery "just in case"
So I queried that and he quickly said oh well don't worry about it if you don't think he needs it. It seems that everybody in Malaysia just gets antibiotics automatically when they go to the doctor. My wife grew up in Malaysia and when she gets a cough she gets it for weeks at a time.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As a medical doctor, I can attest to a general over-prescription of antibiotics. I work in Sweden, where we generally don't use as much antibiotics as other parts of the world, but I would say that we use far too much anyway. I am a surgical resident, who is often on call and have a lot of out-patients. The demand from patients that you prescribe some kind of antibiotics is huge, absolutely huge, even for simpler infections where there is little evidence that it will actually shorten the length of illness or level of symtoms. Trying to educate a patient on the matter in a few minutes is no easy task, and other than a general sense of responsibility, nothing keeps one doing just that. Even then, I often hear of my patients going to a different doctor after one or a couple of days and then getting a prescription, even if they haven't gotten any worse. I don't think that there is any easy fix to this problem. People expect a life free of disease, and if they do get some minor illness, they expect immediate recovery. (I am speaking very generally here, of course...)
At first the doctors blew it off as a normal infection even though I rarely get infections of any kind and it felt severe to me. The first few times they just perscribed regular antibiotics which knocked it back but it'd come back in two or three weeks. Finally some one though to check it out and it turned out to be MRSA so they gave me yet another antibiotic which followed the same knock it back comes back in a couple of week pattern. I was then told there was a better one for MRSA so they tried that. Same pattern but in the meantime I moved to another state and wound up with a new doctor that didn't trust her memory. She looked it up and said they were all using the wrong antibiotics and even the one she was going to perscribe was no longer recommended. Finally that series worked and I've been MRSA free for four months. Also I got a secondary infection from all the antibiotics that no one spotted inspite of complaints from me about another problem. That required medicine other than antibiotics to cure. Basically I received five different antibiotics mostly from doctor incompetence. And they wonder why antibiotics are over used? A lot of the problem too is doctors not believing patients. I rarely go to doctors but they still at first thought I was overreacting when I said I thought it was a serious infection. It was in my jaws and throat and I had trouble breathing and swallowing and even wound up going to the hospital once when my throat closed up. They still didn't take it seriously until the tests came back showing MRSA. Even then they didn't give me the right antibiotics. I also now have several scars on my face from later infections that could have been avoided if they had gotten it right the first time and not been so quick to blow me off. Medicine in the US is a train wreck. Did you know tens of thousands of patients die in hospital from neglect every year? I think the last number I heard a few years back was 80,000. That's a disgrace.
Norway also has universal health care, you know. In fact, Norway's is actually much more strongly government-run than the UK's: it's a single-payer system, and many decisions are taken centrally rather than left to hospital/doctor discretion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
ColdWetDog? "come back to BITE you"? LOL. Oh, you're TOO MUCH!
As I understood it, there are 2 separate things Norway is doing to fight MRSA, and they are not related (although the article doesn't point that out):
1. Norway is tracking the spread of Staph and quarantining victims to limit the spread.
2. According to the article, Norway isn't prescribing modern antibiotics. This ensures that the Staph that is being passed around Norway probably isn't resistant to antibiotics. This does not make Staph less problematic or control its spread in any way. I'm all for stemming the overuse of antibiotics, but this article smacked of propaganda--or it simply didn't tell the whole story.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
In Scandinavia, most doctors are government employees. They have no incentive for prescribing anything and can freely tell their patients to bugger if they ask for useless drugs. Yes, there are disadvantages to "communist" healthcare, but this story shows there are also some clear advantages. A Belgian Doctor once told me he believed antibiotics should be given as a prevention to all kindergarten kids. A Danish study showed you can cut sick days in kindergartens by half by forcing all children to wash their hands twice a day.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
TFA is painting a picture about Norwegian hospitals that are easy to misinterpret. Yes, floor ar streaked and scratched, there is some dust on cabinets and blood pressure monitors.
Howevery, there it is still not dirty and messy as can be interpreted by the article. Cleaning staff in Norway actually have a 3- year education in cleaning! Translated school information site They learn how to spot the difference between dangerous and non-dangerous dirty surfaces. Think in your own home: The dust on the TV isn't dangerous, but the food spills on the kitchen counter can be. The cleaning staff is simply authorized and empowered to perform the important cleaning first, and leave non-dangerous dirt until they have the time to take care of it.
Or was a quote altered to push a US (only?) brand?
TFA misrepresents the real reason for the low MRSA rates in Norway. Antibiotic use plays a part, but old fashioned hygiene and quarantining infected patients is by far the most important factor. Hospitals all over the US are already on this, it has nothing to do with whether or not health care is "free".
Damn you and your Norwegian logic! *burble* Socialists!
Quack, quack.
If you get staph in Norway, it's treatable. If you get it in the US it isn't. How does that not solve the problem?
The GP poster had a very well thought out, and reasonable argument. For those who do not know, MRSA is Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus - a "resistant" version of a common skin flora bacteria that everyone has. It is resistant to the common penicillin (PCN) antibiotic families, and thus has to be treated with another antibiotic, that breaks down the bacterias cell wall in a different way, with an antibiotic such as Vancomycin. MRSA is comonly found now in gyms, locker rooms common surfaces, etc, but there are multiple strains of it. THe whole culture of having germicidal stuff in all our cleansers and soaps, doesn't help either.
MRSA first surfaced in Japan, where antibiotic (ABX) treatment of anything, was over prescribed, and thus developed there. As far as the USA goes, he is correct in the assumption in that people will undoubtably sue for appropriate behavior like that. People sue for anything nowadays.
..........FULL STOP.
I'm a surgeon in the USA, and fell exactly that way, as do the majority of my colleagues. I also feel the same way about companies advertising for artificial hips and knees.
Some patients will actually say.
"I want the Jack Nickolaus artificial knee." They just have no freakin idea why they want it, or what about it makes it appropriate, or inappropriate for some people.
I also think that the abmulance chasers should not be allowed to sue for any drug that has been approved by the FDA (unless there was some form of malice used to approve it).
Ahhh - such is life.
..........FULL STOP.
If the patient asks for antibiotics for a cold, the doctor can try to talk them out of it and if that fails he should just lie and give them a placebo and write it as such in their journal :P
Yeah - single payer if you have time to wait. That's why the company I work for pays hundreds of NOK for my health insurance every month.
This is blinging
About 5 years ago, I had to give up my health insurance (Kaiser Permanente HMO, really) because we moved to a more rural area where they don't have local infrastructure. I didn't get regular health insurance from another company because my Kaiser coverage had been subsidized through an old employer plan, and everything else was too expensive. I worried that I'd get really sick and not have my HMO coverage, because I was used to going a few times a year for various things.
Fast forward 5 years later, and I haven't been to a doctor or hospital at all in that time. I seem to get sick less often than I did before when I'd go to the HMO 3 or 4 times a year with minor ailments, and when I do get sick it's less serious and goes away faster. I've had no antibiotics in that time, just OTC meds (but I avoid fever-reducers unless my fever goes above 102, because fever is one of the body's natural defense mechanisms against microorganisms).
The net result is that me and my immune system are happier, healthier, and wealthier, now that we're not over-relying on doctors and antibiotics. I also believe my household's complete lack of over-cleansing is part of the recipe for good health--people who clean obsessively and use that antibacterial cleanser are destroying harmless bacteria which usually "crowd out" the harmful strains, or at least leave them a minimal space to grow. But when your household is super-clean and a harmful bacterium arrives, it has room to grow everywhere since there's no existing bacterial ecosystem to compete with. Who knew that my stereotypical geeky tendency towards slight messiness and wearing the same clothes 2 days in a row thanks to all-night gaming/writing sessions might increase my health...
I'm sure I'll have to visit the doctor or hospital eventually when something serious happens. Until then, I see my seemingly better health now than when I was going to the doctor several times a year as an anecdotal vindication of the hypothesis that too much cleanliness and hygiene and antibiotic use can be as bad or worse than none, because our immune systems need to develop and thrive by exposure to lesser bacteria in order to be ready to take on serious ones.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
When I started showing signs of mental health issues and went to see a psychiatrist, their reaction was essentially throw the book at me. They put me on wave after wave of things I can't even pronounce, some of which had horrifying side effects. Eventually, I had such a bad psychological reaction to one of the meds that I had to be admitted to the emergency room. That night, my attending physician signed me over to an insanity ward and I spent three weeks there, unable to leave. Seriously, I was not allowed to leave because I was considered a "danger to myself and others". I can assure you this was not the case at all until people started messing with my head.
My point is, these days with every small hiccup in orderly behavior, you get closer and closer to being tossed off a cliff into the pit of mental abnormality. Once you're in that pit, you're free game for doctors to control the way you think. I have friends that have gone through light bouts of depression but now will probably be on dangerous medication for the rest of their lives. I myself am on a dependancy-forming drug that alters the way I think and has a high risk of diabetes and liver failure. Years ago, there were no fancy drugs or somesuch to be prescribed for mental health conditions. For the most part, people just dealt with their issues. I would have gotten over my stress-related issues. Perhaps it would have involved a nervous breakdown, but the modern route put me through much worse.
I suppose I'm on the business end of the whole mental health thing, so I'm bound to be biased. Even so, you do not want to get involved in this stuff. I have yet to hear of anyone that has actually been helped, or even not hurt by psychiatrists.
I recently went to India with friends and was the only person not to get Sick.
Every single one of my travel companions had the GermX out and sanitized their hands after they did ANYTHING. When I separated from the group for the second half of the trip, I don't even think I washed my hands most of the time. I had a GREAT time walking out beyond the tourist traps into the 'old city' and trying stuff in the little shops. The Indians looked at me like they had never seen a white person trying 'their' food and the white people I told the story to just kept telling me "You're going to get sick. You're going to ruin your trip." (As they excused themselves to rush back to the bathroom). The water in the mountains (Sikkim) tasted... nothing short of amazing. It put all the bottled water to shame.
I live the bachelors life and grew up in a dirty ole farmhouse. Sour cream/Jelly/AppleSauce has mold on the top? Scrape off the top and eat the rest. I've accidentally left milk out during the day and just come home, swish it around and put it back in the fridge. (As long as the taste isn't affected too much.) Unless I'm cooking for or around other people or expected to shake hands etc, I rarely wash my hands. Hell I'll go from #2 to the dinner table as long as the TP didn't break. Growing up I ate dog food, with the dogs, rolled around in the mud and put who knows what into my mouth.
And guess what. I'm NEVER sick. No headcolds, no flus, no coughs, no phlegm. I'm not allergic to peanuts or other household items because my body is bored (it's just a theory). Compared to my college roommate, who grew up in what sounded nothing less than a clean room, who was sick when the weather changed. HAD to have the bottom bunk because of random nose bleeds in the middle of the night. Took a dozen or so pills for everything and still was always sick. Went through tissue paper at a box a week.
I'm a primary care physician in the US. There are a number of logistical issues in the decision whether to prescribe antibiotics. They revolve around the ease of followup. It would be nice to always be able to say "You'll probably be fine. If you get sicker, come back." But if it's a Thursday or Friday, or if the patient lives an hour's drive from the clinic, or if I'm about to go on vacation, or if my schedule is overbooked for the next few days, I'm much more likely to prescribe an antibiotic. We need better access to care. Among the things that would help that would be (1) single payer insurance, so people could get care anywhere, and (2) better compensation for primary care providers (PCPs) which would result in (a) more of them, relative to specialists and (b) less need for existing PCP to overbook their schedules to make ends meet.
Hospitals do not have MRSA because "hospitals are dirty." Look at it logically. MRSA can be very difficult to treat. If cleaning hospitals would keep doctors from having to treat MRSA cases, they would clean hospitals. The fact is they do clean them, very thoroughly ... but it doesn't work. MRSA has the tenacity of a cockroach. Studies have shown that even the most over-the-top, costly cleaning measures still do not get rid of 100 percent of MRSA in hospitals. It is simply a fact of life.
Here is something else you might not know: There are two types of MRSA infections. There are nosocomial infections, which are the ones you get in hospitals; and then there are the other kind, which you pick up "in the wild." Wild MRSA and hospital MRSA are two different strains of the bacteria. You might cut your hand on something at home and come down with a resistant staph infection, but it would be a different infection than the kind you might catch in the hospital. The stuff you get in the hospital exists only in hospitals. It is specifically evolved to exist in those environments. And -- at least in the U.S., I can't speak for elsewhere -- it exists in every hospital. It's very likely that this development was inevitable.
I get tired of hearing people who have never studied the problem saying things like "if only everybody would wash their hands, nobody would get sick" or "if only nobody would take antibiotics, nobody would get sick." Things like that sound nice -- and it's true that washing your hands is a good idea, and it's true that antibiotics are often prescribed when they are not necessary -- but but to talk this way is to grossly oversimplify the problem.
Antibiotics have saved countless millions of lives. Are they over-prescribed? Perhaps. But all that means is that we are squandering the potential of one of the great discoveries of science. It doesn't mean that taking antibiotics is somehow "bad," or that antibiotics are somehow "making us sicker," which seems to be what so many people insinuate today.
If antibiotics don't work as well as they used to because bacteria are developing resistance, we should be sad for that. But recognize that the battle we are fighting here is essentially Man vs. Evolution. Back in the 1950s, public health professionals actually announced that the discovery of antibiotics was going to mean the end of human disease. We can see now that this was a pretty foolish thing to say. We now realize that we need to revise how we treat many diseases, and prescribing fewer antibiotics may be one way to do that. But we will also need to keep revising how we treat disease, probably throughout the lifespan of humanity.
Breakfast served all day!
I happen to be a bit of an expert in this field - no shit
below is from memory; if people are really interested, i can pull out some references from the scientific literature that back all of this up
MRSA stands for "methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus", and it was 1st detected in the UK in the (i think ) '60s
lets backup a bit
the human body is covered, inside and out, with bacteria, which can be harmful, neutral or beneficial - for instance, vitamin B12, a requirement for life, is made by bacteria.
All humans carry Staphylococcus epidermidis; ~ 20% also carry S aureus, which prefers to live in moist places like the inside of the nose (anterior nares) throat, axilla, groin and rectum. Epidermidis is pretty harmless, except for people with implanted devices like catheters; since epi likes "surfaces" it tends to colonize the surface of catheters.
Most people have either epi or aureus, but not both,and these two bugs are a small part of the total skin microflora.
In general, having S aureus on your skin or in your nose does not seem to be harmful; however, if you have a cut, and aureus gains entry to the bloodstream, this is a very serious matter. S aureus , whoose genome is sequenced, carrys a host of "virulence factors" that make it a particularly dangerous infection in the blood; in th era before antibiotics, the mortality rate for aureus septicemia was over 50%, and perhaps 80% in some hospitals (!).
That is, ify ou were a physcian in the most advanced medical center in the world in the 1940s, and a healthy patient got an aureus infection in the blood - perhaps due to infection of a surgical site , where the skin is open- there was a 50% chance that pateint would die. Aureus also tends to grow on the heartvalves, which is the disease known as endocarditis; i should think it obvious that having a film of bacteria on your heart valves is not a good idea.
It is easy to see how penicillin, which was very effective, was viewed as a miracle drug. However, within a few years, aureus became resistant to penicillin, and hospitals were starting to see epidemics of untreatable penicillin resistant aureus.
Luckily, the pharmaceutical compnaies and thier scientists had variations of penicillin - the first was methicillin; since then, dozens of beta lactam antibiotics, the mot advanced of which are the carbapenems and fifth generation cephalosporins (wikipedia is good here) have ben developed.
Staph took 10-20 years to become resistant to methicillin; however, when staph do become resistant, they do so by aquisition of a virus like element (SCCmec) which often carries resistance to a whole host of other antibiotics, so that MRSA is actually a bug that is resistant to many drugs. (technically, SCCmec encodes a replacement for PBP2a, PBP2a', which has a lactam resistant transpeptidase function; but no transglycosylase). the origin of SCCmec is unkown.
The drugs of choice for MRSA are vancomycin, daptomycin and colistin; ceftobiprole, approved in canada and switzerland , is supposed to be very effective.
Vancomycin is very $ and nephrotoxic; the others are worse.
If one looks at different countrys around the world, one sees that some countrys - in particular the netherlands and the scandanavian countrys - have very low rates of MRSA, that is most of the aureus is methicillin sensitive.
However, if you look in detail - and believe me, a lot of scientists have looked very hard - it is hard to find one particular reason why these countrys have low rates of MRSA; rather, it seems to be due to a "bundle" of practices. In general, these countrys have good antibiotic stewardship - drugs are not prescribed unless you need them; they spnd a lot on controlling outbreaks, and they are very carefull to test people from outside the country, who might hve MRSA, when they enter the hospital.
In the US, the statistics on how many people get MRSA and how many die have been compiled by several authors; the most well known is monica klevens of the CDC.
Now it
Antibiotics don't prevent organ rejection, that would be immunosuppressant drugs.
You get an infection, your immune system goes into overdrive to beat it and will soon start attacking the transplanted organ. You will soon afterwards reject the organ. Case and point, you can't do an organ transplant without antibiotics, whether or not you consider it a proximal or distal necessity. Organ transplant patients are often drowned in antibiotics if they get so much as a fever, since their immunosuppressant drugs prevent their bodies from overreacting to infection.
if your sore throat (throat ache, whatever) is actually strep throat you need antibiotics to prevent rheumatic fever
No you don't. You may need antibiotics if your infection doesn't go away on its own, but most people's immune systems are active enough to beat a mild strep infection. The main reason we have rapid strep infections and copious azithromycin prescriptions is that the people who most often get strep infections are students and office workers, neither of which will take the necessary time off when they get ill, and therefore need to get over the illness as fast as possible to prevent spreading it. If the same sick people stayed at home, it's far less likely they'd spread the infection, and they'd (most likely) get over it on their own. This is precisely what Norway has implemented.
It's the same reason everyone wants the 'cure to the common cold' and the reason flu shots are becoming much more common in school aged children. If there was a drug that effectively treated the flu, you can rest assured it'd fly off the shelves in America, and people would stay right at work, spreading the flu on to other coworkers instead of just taking a sick day or a few and getting over it on their own.
dog bites are much cleaner than human bites and usually don't require prophylactic antibiotics
While they're 'cleaner' than human bites, meaning that dog's mouths have more active immune systems and thusly carry less nasty, disease causing germs, the fact remains that they do carry germs, and many dogs are carriers of much nastier bacteria than the human mouth contains, for example Strep A which can cause "the flesh eating" disease necrotizing fasciitis. If you get a dog bite, you absolutely want to wash the area thoroughly and at least treat the wound with a topical antibiotic solution as a prophylactic ("neosplorin" as many people in America know it). In fact, broken skin is probably the best overall reason to use antibiotics, as even relatively simple skin infections can quickly jump to the bloodstream and cause quick onset sepsis and death, sometimes even in healthy individuals.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
If someone was as careful as possible why should they be sued?
I agree if it comes to light that someone was truly negligent or intentionally caused harm then something should be done about that but if due diligence was made and someone wasn't omniscient enough to see something obscure why should they be punished simply because someone was hurt somewhere? Do you think the Chinese butterfly researcher should be sued for the hurricanes in the Atlantic caused by his butterflies? Sometimes bad things happen and there's no one you can or should be able to sue. Tough luck. You certainly shouldn't sue the ones who were trying their best to help you.
Thank you for the great comment!
I would like to suggest that your "don't play doctor" point is actually part of a much larger problem in our culture these days: a lack of respect/understanding of education/training. They look at you and think, "This just looks like some guy/girl. What makes him so special? I'm a precious snowflake." Well, what makes a physician special is tons of education and a license to practice medicine granted by experts in the field. Yes, experts. They exist. However, increasingly, it seems, we see people lacking even basic qualifications being elevated to high levels of power/responsibility (*cough* Sarah Palin *cough*). We see trained journalists losing out to "citizen journalists" like the hacks at Boing Boing.
We as a society have invested much of our history to devising ways to ensure that we have at least a basic meritocracy, that qualifications are clear and standard, but it seems that a lot of people just are turning their backs on that and thinking they can do better with Wikipedia. It's terrifying.
And to anyone else reading this: Most doctorates are very hard to get, and you don't get them without knowing a lot. Toss a license on there, as in the case of your physician, and these people are Better Than You. Get over it.
I am an American that has been living in Norway for about 10 years now and think this comment is inaccurate. From my experience, I agree there are decisions "made centrally" but doctors in Norway do have a significant say in how a patient will be treated. There are guidelines, but its not system where disease\infection "A" with specific symptoms "B" and "C" must be treated in a government approved way (like looking it up in a manual). The doctors are involved and make decisions on treatment.
I only say this because universal health care is a touchy subject in the States currently and I have heard arguments stating that the "government" not your doctor will be making decisions while referring to systems in other countries, this is not true imo.
Ironically for Americans that are lucky enough to have health insurance they are willing to trust their health care to a private insurance company that is looking to turn a profit. I would trust my health to the government over a private business worried about their bottom line anyhow... But that is another discussion.
I completely disagree. The FDA is not some magical organization that can predict every single possible negative consequence of every single drug ever sent to their offices. If a drug slipped by that happens to cause severe problems in some patients 10 years down the road, then they should be able to sue someone. Everyone may have been as careful as possible, but there was still something overlooked, or some mistake made, and that has consequences.
If it was proven that the drugs companies were knew about this possibility and did not reveal it then yes they should be held responsible. On the other hand if a drugs company did everything realistically possible, given the tools available at the time to ensure the limits of side effects or documented everything then they should be protected. I say this because drugs companies aren't gods and are trying to find the best solution they can for a system they don't fully understand. When being prescribed medicine there is a risk factor that needs to be taken into account: are the side effects better than not taking the medicine at all?
If you expect drugs companies to make perfect medicine, then I ask you to reverse engineer an OS for a known issue with the absence of the creator's documentation (no MFC docs, no Linux docs etc), and then guarantee your patch will be perfect.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No it doesn't. Other selection pressures completely overwhelm it. It's a bit like why humans don't grow bone armors despite this making them more resistant to bear attacks: bear attacks are too rare to cause a selection pressure strong enough to overcome the downsides.
Antibiotics originated from the ecosystem. Penicillin was named after the mold that produces it, a common enough mold that some got into a petri dish accidentally.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.