acroyear | Do Doctors need to know about evolution? (Reply)

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.)