General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: You can't criticize one pseudoscience when supporting another. [View all]Sancho
(9,067 posts)"The details changed, but the fundamental rule of "give enough antibiotic to wipe out everything" has been in place for a very long time."
That is not the debate. MD's were not worried about MRSA. The issue is that the "rules" are now changed because there was not recognition of the need to avoid resistance at the rate and level we now see. Now the rules are to test for specificity, etc. and not just "give enough".
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"This is because the actual levels of resistance, use of antibiotics in farm animals, etc. were not issues until the 60,s', 70's and 80's."
Exactly!!! We don't know the ways that GMOs will be used or evolve, etc. So can you anticipate the future? No...the example of antibiotic use in animals applies to this situation exactly! You said it.
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"Resistance to one antibiotic is not resistance to all antibiotics. You can give "original" penicillin to any creature you want. Resistance to it is so common that it's no longer useful medically, and any newly-developed resistance is to a medication no longer used."
Again, you prove the point. Alexander Fleming had no idea if penicillin would be useless over time. It took time to develop the resistance and to figure out it didn't work. It may take time to see if GMOs have problems (not just toxicity) that are unknown today.
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"Utterly and completely wrong. Because the vast majority of the time, broad-spectrum antibiotics still work. If you've got a bacterial infection, you're going to be getting one of two antibiotics. If that doesn't work, then they'll think about culturing the bacteria to figure out what it really is."
Exactly!!! Now you have to culture more and diagnoses more specifically. Even a county family physician today will have a large list of antibiotics and antibacterials to pick from depending on the diagnosis.
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"If you get the prescription in less than 3 days, they did not determine what the bacteria is. "
Maybe...new tests are quicker, but that's not the point. We only know how to determine the bacteria now because we can test things that no one could look for 50 years ago. Again, the point is that we know more than we used to...and we have multi-generations of antibiotics to chose from.
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"Actually, you can. Because the claims being made are about human toxicity. That hasn't changed. Dangers of the modifications spreading to other plants? Also already studied and not changed since 2000. Pollen still works the same way."
You may think so, but that's not the history of science. In fact, it's haughty and naive to think so! In the 1880's medical textbooks claimed that tobacco caused cancer. It took almost 100 years to find evidence! The claims made about GMOs is very early and based on correlational, ex post facto studies. It's not definitive yet.
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"You can believe in anything. That doesn't make it true."
If I live long enough, I will see if GMO's prove to be more or less "safe" or "useful", but there's no way to declare it so today. There is simply not a time span, or a basic scientific knowledge, or an applied scientific knowledge to say for sure.
I will stick to the original statement. The evidence for vaccines has more scientific history than GMOs, so the original comparison in this post has a logical fallacy. Sorry, the distraction of a debate over antibiotics won't change the issue. Antibiotics was an example of science that was "well understood", until we learned better over time!