Lunch today helped me understand one reason I am so incredibly sensitive about food. I noticed that the food I hadwhich was of the red and spicy Korean typeseemed a lot more spicy and it was even somewhat painful to eat.
Ah, yes, it’s the infection. The one I complained about after camp, which I didn’t (for the longest time) realize was tonsilitis. The one which the dentist prescribed me 3 days of antibiotics for. Well, the 3 days of antibiotics did the only thing that they could do: they killed off the weakest of the bugs, leaving me with a much stronger strain of tonsilitis bugs to revisit me and et their revenge.
The fact that this only happened because I was given three days of medication makes me once again curious about the way the government controls prescriptions. To spare the bored or those who don’t care, I’ll give you the choice of not reading on.
A full course of antibiotics would have helped to avert this, I believe (here’s an article about why). But the state of things is such that this fact isn’t even taught in schools. Well educated people I know over here don’t know about this, which surprised me when I discovered it since I think almost everyone I know in Canada was aware of this.
Well, it’s frustrating for doctors, I guess. Pharmacists seem over-represented in the government; and in the Ministry of Health and Welfare and its subdepartments, like the FDA, people with medical educations are (I have been told) drastically underrepresented. They would have to be, if what many medical professionals have told me about the legal limits on drug presciption are true. No competent doctor would ever tell a government that a nationwide policy of never prescribing a full course of antibiotics is a good idea.
Drug companies are more interested than anything in the bottom line, in the endless profits they can suck out of “consumers”, and are looking for new ways to expand their ability to do so. And look what they try to sell for those profits. It’s enough to put one off over-the-counter medications altogether; and I worry for those of my Korean friends who think it’s a good idea to get medication for just about any ailment, and trust pharmacists.
Meanwhile, any doctor I go to will be constrained to prescribing me something far less than a full course of antibiotics for my tonsilitis. I am hoping, however, to convince a clinic doctor that this is a recurring infection, and explain that the bugs causing this one are resistant and strong, and that I’ll be needing more than 3 days worth of pills. Even ten days would be something, and I’m willing to drop by the clinic a second or third time if necessary to get them. Or, of course, to go to another clinic.
But I wonder if there might be a way to get the country to move to a more reasonable law about prescription drugs? I’m thinking, thinking. I know I can’t do it. I think someone has to, though. Let alone the fact such practices risk the eventual creation of superflus; all the recurrent infections it would avert (and the lost productivity and time wasted on multiple ineffective treatments) should be enough to convince the country that prescribing full courses of antibiotics is just good sense.