Some interesting news from a country with Evil Socialized Medicine

12-31-2009, 07:49 AM

Something I've had some interest in for a long time was up on the website of my local newspaper.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/...in-norway.html

In short, the Norwegians have found an incredibly effective solution to MRSA - the resistant staph infection that kills some 19,000 people per year in American hospitals alone (more than AIDS as the article quotes).

What's this new miracle cure?

Among other things, stop overprescribing antibiotics.

Here's how they deal with MRSA:

Quote:

Norwegian doctors prescribe fewer antibiotics than any other country, so people do not have a chance to develop resistance to them.

Patients with MRSA are isolated and medical staff who test positive stay at home.

Doctors track each case of MRSA by its individual strain, interviewing patients about where they�ve been and who they�ve been with, testing anyone who has been in contact with them.

Here's another quote from the article:

Quote:

Haug unlocks the dispensary, a small room lined with boxes of pills, bottles of syrups and tubes of ointment.

What�s here? Medicines considered obsolete in many developed countries.

What�s not?

Some of the newest, most expensive antibiotics, which aren�t even registered for use in Norway, �because if we have them here, doctors will use them,� he says.

He points to an antibiotic. �If I treated someone with an infection in Spain with this penicillin, I would probably be thrown in jail,� he says, �and rightly so because it�s useless there.�

Norwegians are sanguine about their coughs and colds, toughing it out through low-grade infections.

�We don�t throw antibiotics at every person with a fever. We tell them to hang on, wait and see, and we give them a Tylenol to feel better,� says Haug.

That last quote - hits home. My ex-wife's grandmother would demand penicillin from her doctor every time she had a cold. And he'd prescribe it so that he wouldn't waste time arguing with her that would be better spent treating other patients.

Again, we can learn from other countries.

Some interesting news from a country with Evil Socialized Medicine

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