I had an ear infection a few weeks ago. I suspect my spring allergies were the cause. Every spring my middle ears feel full of water from a blocked Eustachian tube. This year either the blockage caused an infection my poking around inside my ear caused one.
Either way, after several days of worsening pain I went to urgent care. Although the doctor couldn’t’t see visible signs of infection, he gave me a prescription for antibiotics with instructions to fill it only if the pain didn’t subside within another day or two. The pain didn’t subside so I began taking the antibiotics a few days later.
Within a few days the pain was gone.
I’ve read that a primary cause of death for humans before antibiotics was infection. It got me thinking about all the numerous infections we can get from everyday activities. Before antibiotics you could die from so many minor or major injuries:
- A cavity or cracked tooth
- A cut on your hand
- An animal bite
- A human bite
- An insect bite
- Any injury that breaks the skin
- An ear infection
- Surgery
The Black Plague, which killed millions of people and decimated the global population for centuries has now been nearly eliminated by vaccines and antibiotic treatment. This plague once wiped out families, cities, towns and villages on a cyclical basis.
We have vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, polio and the flu (and Covid).
We have anesthesia for surgery and dental procedures. (I thought about this a lot with my recent molar extraction and implant. I literally felt no pain during a brutal extraction and subsequent screwing of a titanium bolt into my jaw. No pain at all. That’s a miracle which I attribute to novocaine and a few other dental anesthetic drugs.
It is freaking amazing when I think about it.
Polio was crippling kids when my mother was growing up. By the time I was in school in the 1970s, every school child in the US had been vaccinated against it.
Antibiotics were discovered in 1928 and first used on soldiers during World War Two. They were only widely available to the general public after 1945. Imagine that. My mother was born 1945. Her parents, my grandparents, grew up in an era when getting an infection could kill you.
I have my issues with American Healthcare, big Pharma, medical insurance and our for-profit medical system which I’ll frequently rail against.
But, the older I get, the more I appreciate much of what I’ve always taken for granted because I have learned that it wasn’t very long ago when we lived in world without it.
