It Ain't What You Think

I highly recommend the December 1st, 2016 episode of Freakonomics. You can find it at http://freakonomics.com/archive and on a number of podcast directories, such as itunes. Unfortunately their podcasts and even their website doesn't play well. You probably need to download it to hear it without stuttering or rebuffering. Beats me, I tried several podcast players and it often just repeats sections. On to the reason I mention the episode.

One of my pet peeves is the saying that antibiotics don't treat viruses and should not be given when you have a virus. This is hogwash. Well, you can at least say they give them to hogs with results. Years ago the animal food industry learned that even healthy animals given antibiotics gained weight faster and grew faster than those that weren't. I am not advocating antibiotics in our food or the food of our food, I am just stating a fact and running with it.

It turns out we have something called total biological load. The body has to overcome a lot of things just to stay alive and germs are part of that. The issue here is that we have limited resources, so energy going into killing germs can't go into growing and in the case of an animal, getting fat. So you give a healthy animal antibiotics and they grow faster.

Take that information and apply it to you with a bad cold or flu. First, antibiotics would lower your total biological load and give you some extra free biological resources to fight off the bad cold or flu. Secondly, antibiotics prevent secondary infections. Almost every time I get a bad cold it goes into a bacterial sinus condition if I don't do something to prevent it.

​In this episode of freakonomics, they have a doctor that points out he learned that contrary to popular belief, you should give antibiotics to children with the measles. It prevents secondary infections and even death in some cases. You just don't hear that truth spoken. I was amazed. You mention antibiotics for a virus and they are ready to tar and feather you. If you do an internet search you will see article after article about how antibiotics are not effective against viruses and you are worse than a thief stealing candy from a baby if you take them. Well, that brings us to my third point. Some antibiotics, good old bacteria killing or hindering antibiotics are effective against viruses. You won't hear that many places.

Some of our modern antibiotics work by interfering with the dna or rna of bacteria. They may hinder the reproduction of the bacteria this way. It is too much to get into in a blog post, but guess what? Viruses have dna and rna too. We actually have dna viruses and rna viruses. Not a lot, but a few of our antibiotics work on these viruses. Surprise!

This is actually how they came up with the antiviral drugs we have. They saw things interfering with the reproduction of viruses.

Now, this all aside, there is a huge group telling you that if we take antibiotics that we are creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. This is true, but not nearly to the extent that they claim it. By the way, when you start fighting off an infection, you are creating resistant bacteria too.

I spent some time in Africa and guess what? We found antibiotic resistant bacteria in places where they had never had antibiotics before. The truth is as bacteria change, we are going to run up on bacteria that resist our current antibiotics no matter what we do. We had better just decide to work on that and some people are having success in their research in overcoming the factors that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics. It turns out that garlic added to antibiotics shows promise.

It looks to me like we are going to lose the effectiveness of many of our antibiotics even if we don't use them.

So what does this have to do with wealth? It turns out many of the things we are told ain't like we heard them. It isn't just in health where eggs are good this year and bad the next year and good again the year after. When it comes to money and building wealth we get a lot of bad advice and they even reverse what they say.

What do you believe about money and wealth? Write down what comes to mind. Then ask yourself, what would it look like if these things were wrong.

Do this exercise over a number of days and get ready for a breakthrough.

Einstein said, "We can't solve our problems with the level of thinking we created them with,"

best and be blest,
Scott Hogue CChH