Do Doctors need to know about evolution?

[acroyear]

A rather ignorant, pigheaded jerk of a neurosurgeon doesn't seem to think so, and the DI has been posting his ignorance for all the world to read for the last couple of weeks. Well, here's how doctors who really do care about true biology actually deal with evolution's impacts:

Good Math, Bad Math : Pigheaded Egnorance, Antibiotic Resistance, and Tautologies:

Do Doctors need to be aware of evolution? Does awareness of evolution have anything to do with how Doctors should respond to infections? As an answer, let me tell you a bit about what my children's pediatrician has told us:

• As a pediatrician, she does not routinely prescribe antibiotics. For a basically healthy child, no matter what the infection, she won't prescribe antibiotics for at least 4 days, to give the child's immune system a chance to defeat the infection on its own.
• She does not prescribe antibiotics for any illness until there is hard proof that it's caused by bacteria.
• When she prescribes antibiotics, she does it in a very strict way. The first prescription for a child without drug allergies is always penicillin.
• After the first time that they prescribe antibiotics, the practice keeps careful track of exactly what has been prescribed to which child when; they follow a strict rotation process with antibiotics to try to not repeatedly prescribe the same antibiotic to a child within a six-month period.
  

Why such a strict process? Because bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics. By following a strict process like this, they minimize the quantity of antibiotics that they prescribe, and they try to prevent a chronically ill child from becoming a walking incubator of resistant bacteria. (And yes, when talking about this, she does specifically say that bacteria are evolving resistance.)

Comments

[queenmaggie.livejournal.com]

Fascinating discussion, though I found it disturbing (believable, unfortunately, but disturbing) that one person could write in and say that she'd never heard of the problem of increasingly resistant bacteria before this...

[neadods.livejournal.com]

That doesn't surprise me - one of the canards is that mutation cannot bring about anything beneficial, ergo evolution doesn't "work." I've seen someone argue very seriously that resistance is neither beneficial nor an addition to the genetic code, instead, the bacteria have "lost" whatever it was that made them unresistant.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I'm trying desperately to figure out how that guy got through medical school without ever being exposed to evolution. Or is he simply lying through his teeth when he says evolutionary biology simply isn't taught? And why does that last sound so plausible?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

he'll take it as fact and regurgitate it on a test and nothing is internalized or learned. just like every kid going through a subject they couldn't give less of a damn about.

however, he's not directly an evolution denier and the DI haven't directly painted him as such.

he merely claims that evolution isn't all that important, which is a DI tact that can easily fit into the Wedge Document vision - if evolution can be publicly seen as being not all that important, then maybe they can get it out of the school systems that way, turning biology (back) into just a bunch of unrelated facts to be spit out by the kids who don't give a damn what is thrown at them.

So really his lies are that medicine doesn't need to know evolution, and the only counter to that is to show article upon article that uses evolution directly to support a particular change that directly affects medicine.

the hassle is that the "tautology" they claim is that only bacteria resistant to antibiotics survive. well, yes, that's true. but its the being "kinda" resistant that's the place science looks at. Some survive, some don't, there's no genetic difference between the two, so it comes down to probabilities. of the ones that survive, we see NEW GENES develop that accentuate themselves to the point of taking over - genes that can be seen only as a mutational adaptation to the environment of living amongst antibiotics: evolution right in front of us. every gene like that has a name and a number and at least 5 articles supporting it.

all of that he blithely ignores by simply trying to pass of the lie that the bacteria were "always" immune.

[shalandara.livejournal.com]

Personally, I only ask for antibiotics for my children *when there is a good cause*. Like for strep, which is usually why my children get antibiotics. And that is definately something that your body will not get rid of on its own. If it is just a flu or cold I do not take them in, unless they are so obviously sick that it is worrisome.

But then I grew up with a family doc who was aware of the problem of antibiotic resistance in the 70s, and was very careful with prescribing the stuff.