Story two is that trauma care, vaccines, antibiotics and a handful of other things clearly work, and the rest is a mixed bag that mostly cancels out.
If you have a serious bacterial infection antibiotics are clearly helpful and clearly work. On the other hand, if you have a viral infection antibiotics but damage your microbiome for little beneficial effects.
Robin Hanson wrote back in 2009: “Patients with ear infections are more likely to be harmed by antibiotics than helped. While the pills may cause a small decrease in symptoms (for which ear drops work better), the infections typically recede within days regardless of treatment. The same is true for bronchitis,sinusitis, and sore throats. Unnecessary antibiotics are still given to more than one in seven Americans each year for these conditions alone, at a cost of more than $2 billion and tens of thousands of serious adverse medication effects requiring treatment.”
If we were forced to cut medicine by half, no we would not do that by only treating half of trauma patients and only giving half of people antibiotics. People would make reasonably good decisions.
ChatGPT suggests that antibiotic usage in Germany and Japan is less than half that of the United States. Switching from US prescription standards to German or Japanese standards is only giving half of the people antibiotics and there’s a good chance that’s a reasonably good decision that will be beneficial to health outcomes.
People don’t die from illnesses that can be treated with antibiotics in Germany or Japan anymore than they die in the United States. Germany and Japan even have lower death rates from infectious disease than the United States.
Antibiotics seem to be a prime example for how you can cut half of the treatment without problems.
If you have a serious bacterial infection antibiotics are clearly helpful and clearly work. On the other hand, if you have a viral infection antibiotics but damage your microbiome for little beneficial effects.
Robin Hanson wrote back in 2009: “Patients with ear infections are more likely to be harmed by antibiotics than helped. While the pills may cause a small decrease in symptoms (for which ear drops work better), the infections typically recede within days regardless of treatment. The same is true for bronchitis, sinusitis, and sore throats. Unnecessary antibiotics are still given to more than one in seven Americans each year for these conditions alone, at a cost of more than $2 billion and tens of thousands of serious adverse medication effects requiring treatment.”
ChatGPT suggests that antibiotic usage in Germany and Japan is less than half that of the United States. Switching from US prescription standards to German or Japanese standards is only giving half of the people antibiotics and there’s a good chance that’s a reasonably good decision that will be beneficial to health outcomes.
People don’t die from illnesses that can be treated with antibiotics in Germany or Japan anymore than they die in the United States. Germany and Japan even have lower death rates from infectious disease than the United States.
Antibiotics seem to be a prime example for how you can cut half of the treatment without problems.