Physicians these days seem to be well aware of the problem with antibiotics, since the concerns about superbugs have been all over the medical literature since the 1990's and even before.
British scientists warned about the potential for superbugs in the 1960's, shortly after penicillin became widely available. Even Flemming, the discoverer of penicillin mentioned it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in the 1950's: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/12/supe...ce-history
At the time, the ability to cure disease and prolong life was fairly new and average people were suddenly living a LOT longer (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectan...71%20years.) If you look at the chart, the rise starts about the time that sanitation became common (the HUGE dip in the world life expectancy in the 1960's comes from the widespread famines in China -- thanks to Mao's very bad policies and droughts)
Here's where the tyranny of the marketplace overruns the concerns of science.
Superbugs and new diseases (and newly identified diseases) meant more opportunities for pharmaceutical companies, and they pushed their R&D departments to find more to be prepared for the Next Big Superbug. While some of this was done out of humanitarian concern, policy from the top was also dictated by how happy the shareholders were with profits... and we all know how that turned out.
Salesmen started telling doctors (who relied on what the companies told them about the medications and what was printed in the information pamphlets from those companies) that antibiotics can cure colds and many other diseases (and that would be a "nope." Only works on bacteria, not viruses.) The FDA (your government in action) created the "Bad Ad" program as part of a response to these lies: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/office-prescri...ad-program
(and that's a whole different discussion)
The dangers to the gut biome were well known (IF you majored in biology) when I was in college in the late 1960's. My biology professor told us the story of a germophobe woman who drank Listerol to get rid of the "bugs in her gut" and the impact it had on her body. The fact that I can still cite some of the details tells you how memorable that was.
But...profit overruled science. That's why I knew about it so long ago, and some physicians and researchers did as well.
Finally, in 2016 (yes, sixty years AFTER Flemming warned about superbugs), scientists and activists made enough noise to get the attention of lawmakers and others and information started getting into the hands of the average citizen (and many doctors) https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/...cessarily/
And that's why you didn't know about it.
Now you can get probiotics for many things, including some fairly ineffective ones. We need to have a talk with advertisers about that as well.
There are many things to worry about, but unless you have some unusual conditions, homo sapiens is one of the toughest species on the planet. We can eat almost anything that doesn't eat us first. We can drink water (tap water) that will kill fish within an hour. We swim in swimming pools full of water that would kill a frog within thirty minutes or less (a rather agonizing death) and survive temperatures that would kill a lot of animals. We're not constrained by biomes... we can live anywhere on the globe that we want to (and if it's not livable we can make a living space there with our technology.)
Our gut biome adjusts to whatever we feed it. People who live together tend to have similar gut profiles, but it varies with country. The best thing for your gut is to eat a lot of different foods and to enjoy life as best you can.
And be happy. Stress is worse for your gut than most chemicals (because of the stress chemicals your body produces https://tristategastro.net/how-stress-af...e%20(IBD).
British scientists warned about the potential for superbugs in the 1960's, shortly after penicillin became widely available. Even Flemming, the discoverer of penicillin mentioned it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in the 1950's: https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/12/supe...ce-history
At the time, the ability to cure disease and prolong life was fairly new and average people were suddenly living a LOT longer (https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectan...71%20years.) If you look at the chart, the rise starts about the time that sanitation became common (the HUGE dip in the world life expectancy in the 1960's comes from the widespread famines in China -- thanks to Mao's very bad policies and droughts)
Here's where the tyranny of the marketplace overruns the concerns of science.
Superbugs and new diseases (and newly identified diseases) meant more opportunities for pharmaceutical companies, and they pushed their R&D departments to find more to be prepared for the Next Big Superbug. While some of this was done out of humanitarian concern, policy from the top was also dictated by how happy the shareholders were with profits... and we all know how that turned out.
Salesmen started telling doctors (who relied on what the companies told them about the medications and what was printed in the information pamphlets from those companies) that antibiotics can cure colds and many other diseases (and that would be a "nope." Only works on bacteria, not viruses.) The FDA (your government in action) created the "Bad Ad" program as part of a response to these lies: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/office-prescri...ad-program
(and that's a whole different discussion)
The dangers to the gut biome were well known (IF you majored in biology) when I was in college in the late 1960's. My biology professor told us the story of a germophobe woman who drank Listerol to get rid of the "bugs in her gut" and the impact it had on her body. The fact that I can still cite some of the details tells you how memorable that was.
But...profit overruled science. That's why I knew about it so long ago, and some physicians and researchers did as well.
Finally, in 2016 (yes, sixty years AFTER Flemming warned about superbugs), scientists and activists made enough noise to get the attention of lawmakers and others and information started getting into the hands of the average citizen (and many doctors) https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2016/...cessarily/
And that's why you didn't know about it.
Now you can get probiotics for many things, including some fairly ineffective ones. We need to have a talk with advertisers about that as well.
There are many things to worry about, but unless you have some unusual conditions, homo sapiens is one of the toughest species on the planet. We can eat almost anything that doesn't eat us first. We can drink water (tap water) that will kill fish within an hour. We swim in swimming pools full of water that would kill a frog within thirty minutes or less (a rather agonizing death) and survive temperatures that would kill a lot of animals. We're not constrained by biomes... we can live anywhere on the globe that we want to (and if it's not livable we can make a living space there with our technology.)
Our gut biome adjusts to whatever we feed it. People who live together tend to have similar gut profiles, but it varies with country. The best thing for your gut is to eat a lot of different foods and to enjoy life as best you can.
And be happy. Stress is worse for your gut than most chemicals (because of the stress chemicals your body produces https://tristategastro.net/how-stress-af...e%20(IBD).
