Antibiotics

The finger is a lot better; I’ll spare you the detail. The irritating thing is, I took antibiotics: I don’t know if I had to take antibiotics, but in this case the pain was so great it was a choice between drastic manual action and tablets, neither of which I am entirely comfortable with. This leads to an interesting conundrum, because with the collapse of civilization we are most likely to see a rapid dwindling in the supply of modern medicines. The ones that will disappear first are likely to be those which make the least money for the pharmaceutical companies, followed by governments almost certainly trying to force the same companies to concentrate on drugs that help with acute conditions, such as asthma inhalers, anti-inflammatories, many vaccines, and antibiotics. This will be followed by a loss in the availability of those drugs which are technologically complex to make, and a return to both plant- and fungal-based medication, and an increase in more dramatic surgical intervention.

Oh dear, that doesn’t sound fun. But we should be careful in trotting out the same scare-stories as Big Pharma and the governments of the industrial world would encourage us to believe: for one, we know that with the loss of industrial output will be a reciprocal reduction in cancer rates; for two, the incidence of disease increases rapidly (possibly exponentially) with population density, the cities are most definitely not the place to be – but as we all know cities will not survive peak oil, water shortages and (in many cases) rising sea levels regardless of anything we do to make them “sustainable”; for three, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible using non-synthetic medication, largely because the industrial world wants us to depend upon its own infrastructure.

I’m not saying that there is any truth in such junk web sites as Natural News and Mercola, but the moment we start Connecting – the focus of what I am currently writing – with even what’s in our own back yards, the idea of natural medication won’t seem anything like as daunting. It is certainly true that bacterial and parasitic infections are the most common causes of death in non-industrial cultures, but as I consider the wedge of blue cheese waiting to be eaten at some point today, the thought of even producing our own antibiotics doesn’t seem such a burden.