#242: Antibiotic Resistance

Artie had a sinus infection last week. He couldn’t get in to see his doctor on short notice & even though he said it was urgent, he didn’t want to drop into urgent care, so he decided to take the prophylactic antibiotic pack he had leftover from the Mumbai trip, which he never used. Everyone’s told him self-medicating is a bad idea and he’s probably only contributing to the super strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that’s soon to overtake the planet and send society spiraling into a zombie-infested hellscape. But the sinus thing cleared up & society goes on. He said he started to feel better immediately, but the directions said to take the entire course of pills, so that’s what he did, even though he Googled it and found an article about a new study that calls that practice into question (& even though it probably wasn’t even a bacterial infection to begin with, according to...everyone). He doesn’t seem to have taken any lessons from it, other than the antibiotics caused some troubling GI issues that were worse than the sinus issues, so if he had to do it all over again, he said he’d probably just suffer through. -Ed.

(P.S. I’m posting this over eggs benedict & salmon lox from the all-you-can-eat Saturday breakfast buffet at Salty’s on Alki in West Seattle which makes it a working breakfast and therefore a 100% legitimate business expense on the corporate Amex card. I may be here awhile.)