If there is one group that can be blamed for the downfall of humanity, it has to be over-protective parents. It isn't that there aren't more people doing more dramatic harm elsewhere, it's just that those people diminish the present, while over-protective parents erode the future.
Between 2001 and 2006 the percentage of children's infections caused by drug-resistant staph germs raised from 12 percent to 28 percent, according to a report released recently by researchers in Chicago. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is a genetic inevitability, undeniable proof of the reality of evolution in simpler organisms.
MRSA is a mutation that arose out of an overprescribing of antibiotic drugs to treat just about anything possible. When an organism that goes through so many more generations in a given time period than we do is exposed to a harmful toxin, it is a given that in time, natural selection will produce a version of the organism that doesn't find the toxin toxic. Fun, eh?
What we are left with is an infection that spreads quietly and easily and does not respond to treatment as well as its brethren, or even respond at all, and can kill a person.
There has never been a society that has thrived in the absence of challenge. Wouldn't it stand to reason that if civilizations can be represented as people, the same could be true of people being represented by civilizations?
If our children are not challenged both mentally and physically, they will perish. From a medical standpoint, this means letting a child get sick and work through the ailment on his or her own, so that the body learns how to cope with illness. It means letting a child learn self-control instead of doping him or her to the gills with Ritalin. It means letting people experience sadness as a valid emotion, rather than filling them with Zoloft for the unhappies and Ambien for insomnia.
MRSA is only the most obvious downside of the American tendency to overmedicate. There are other, more insidious effects, guaranteed. Nothing good ever came easily. That includes health.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
