Urgent care centers over prescribing antibiotics for profit, not health

By Bob Livingston

People are often taken aback when they see me write that modern medicine is a killing machine for profit.

Believe me, I take no pleasure in stating it. It places me on the wrong side of conventional wisdom and subjects me to all manner of abuse. That’s because by the time people reach adulthood, the system has sealed their thought processes so that nothing is questioned. What the doctor says is gospel. The imperative to inquire and question is gone.

We are literally a prescription drug culture, and we accept the doctor’s advice on drugs without question, not suspecting that the drug the doctor prescribes is done so based on a monetary interest as much or more than a medical one. Hospitals and medical research centers have become virtual temples to human experimentation in the “quest for knowledge.”

The modern mind has been conditioned to equate medicine with health. If you get sick, so conventional wisdom goes, then you must need a drug or drugs to “cure” the sick… otherwise you will remain sick.

So the doctors prescribe a drug or drugs to address the symptoms. They practice symptomology. They doctor the symptoms, not the underlying cause of the disease. Sometimes these drugs make people feel better for a time. Sometimes they make the person feel better until the body manages to cure itself.

This is especially true when it comes to treating common and everyday illnesses like colds and flus and other upper respiratory infections. But the piper must eventually be paid.  And we’re paying it in the form of the rise of antibiotic-resistant drugs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that each year at least 2 million people become infected and at least 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infectious agents.  A 2015 report from Public Health England found that “significant antibiotic-resistant infection” rose significantly from 2010 to 2014.

Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” are growing ever more prevalent and ever more deadly. This increase comes as a direct result of the growing and widespread use of general antibiotics across the human spectrum.

Antibiotics are pumped into the chickens we eat and that produce our eggs. Antibiotics are pumped into the cattle that we eat and that produce our milk. Antibiotics are pumped into the pork we eat. Antibiotics are pumped into the turkeys we eat.

On top of that, doctors are prescribing antibiotics pre-surgery and post-surgery, whether or not infections are present. And medical practitioners are not only prescribing antibiotics for common bacterial and fungal infections, but also for viral infections on which antibiotics have no effect. And this is often done, the doctors admit, in order to placate parents conditioned — as mentioned above — to equate medicine with health and who do not want to hear that the earache little Johnny is suffering from will heal on its own if Johnny’s immune system is made strong.

The worst offenders for over-prescribing antibiotics are urgent care centers, according to new analysis published in JAMA International Medicine.

As ArsTechnica reports:

Based on insurance claims from patients with employee-sponsored coverage, researchers estimated that about 46 percent of patients who visited urgent care centers in 2014 for conditions that cannot be treated with antibiotics—such as a common cold that’s caused by a virus—left with useless antibiotic prescriptions that target bacterial infections. That rate of inappropriate antibiotic use is almost double the rate the researchers saw in emergency departments (25 percent) and almost triple the rate seen in traditional medical offices (17 percent).

The authors of the analysis—a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Utah, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—concluded that interventions for urgent care centers are “urgently needed.”

The data is concerning, the team notes, because such misuse of antibiotics can fuel the development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which can go on to become resistant to multiple types of antibiotic drugs and cause intractable, sometimes deadly, infections.

It’s also concerning because of the increasing number of the urgent care centers popping up across the country – there are more than 10,000 in existence and they’re doing a $15 billion business.

Researchers for JAMA Internal Medicine worry that getting doctors at these clinics to dial back their use of antibiotics will be difficult because judicious use of antibiotics doesn’t fit their business model. There’s quite a bit of a “pot-calling-the-kettle-black” going on here, as doling out pills is also the business model of the doctors doing the warning.

ArsTechnica notes that urgent care clinics are designed for convenience and to provide same-day service by funneling as many patients as possible through the doors at low out-of-pocket cost for ailments that don’t warrant an emergency room visit and for patients who don’t want to wait to see their primary doctor or don’t have one.

Lacking a relationship with the patients, who are seen in assembly line fashion, doctors lack the will or motive to try and dissuade the patients from getting the so-called “quick fix” antibiotic injection or bottle of pills, even for ailments the doctors know that antibiotics won’t affect. But they do have the financial incentive to keep patients happy and willing to return for another shot or bottle of pills next time they get sick.

Another study, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found that “[B]oth the number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate… The increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in wealthy areas appears to be driven primarily by increased competition among doctors’ offices, retail medical clinics and other health care providers as they seek to keep patients satisfied with medical care and customer service.”

This is especially true in wealthier areas where patients are able to shop around for care that offers them what they want – a quick fix — rather than what may be in their long-term best interests.

But beyond the danger of “superbugs,” taking too many antibiotics leads to a host of health problems. Antibiotics don’t discern which bacteria to kill and they wipe out the body’s good bacteria with the same abandon as the bad. Good bacteria in the gut play a positive role in promoting a healthy immune system. Antibiotics wipe them out.

If we are to survive modern medicine we must take charge of our own health. Question the doctor on all treatment suggestions and prescriptions. Check the medication’s side effects via a Physician’s Desk Reference or using an online source like Drugs.com. Make sure your health is the consideration rather than the physician’s profits.

You also need to make sure you’re as healthy as possible and have a strong immune system. Disease comes from within. When the body is overly fatigued with excess stress, toxins and malnutrition, there is a breakdown of immunity. So a body must be made healthy with proper hydration and proper nutrition(which means whole foods, mostly raw, and very little meat). It must have a healthy pH and it must have a proper level of essential nutrients, not antibiotics which are becoming less effective at killing the “bad” bacteria but continues to kill the “good” bacteria the body needs to remain healthy.