This will be more like thread leap than creep.

Well, Peg, the reason that there are warnings about medications and that the warnings change from time to time is because those particular "natural" substances are studied in a formal, scientific way. Their effects, both wanted and unwanted, are measured, tested and reported by the scientific community. And when their costs outweigh their benefits in a given application they are withheld.

Whereas the natural substances you recommend are a total crapshoot. Their qualities are known only through anecdote and custom. Your statement that they "do not build up in the body" and "have little or no side effects" necessarily comes out of thin air, since no credible scientific studies have ever been done to substantiate or support such unlikely assumptions.

I would be interested in seeing ANY reference you might cite to support your sweeping assertion that, "treatment with antibiotics makes kids MORE susceptible to infection".

Of course, being essentially anti-scientific in orientation relieves the herbal, and other "alternative" therapeutic belief systems from having to adhere to that which is objectively demonstrable.

Having studied the processes of healing, curing, harming and dying for a lifetime I am convinced that from a spiritual point of view it is the "healing relationship" between a practitioner and the person who is ill that is the key factor in the restoration of wellness, and that the particular metaphor adopted by the healer is of secondary importance. When things are just not right with a person, homeopathy, spritual healing, classical acupuncture or Bock flowers may be as effective as allopathic medicine, perhaps more. The usual methods of practice of allopathy, in fact, may often not provide what the spirit requires to feel better, or even make it feel much worse. But to give the devil its due, allopathic medicine is clearly superior for determining the true causes and devising specific cures for specific illnesses or conditions. Moreover, it is precisely because these cures are so powerful that their unwanted effects may also be severe, and precisely because herbal remedies are only marginally if at all effective, that their side effects may go unnoticed or not appear to be conected with their cause.

Despite the imperfections of medicine and science, to suggest that we abandon medications in favor of a return to the natural foods and herbal cures of an earlier time -- when the average lifespan was 45 years, seems to me at the same time simplistic and extreme.

Yet I have no objection if any should themselves want to do that, and have never been offended when patients declined my medical recommendations. I view the refusal of medical treatment as an interesting natural experiment: natural selection at work, as it were.

I have always recommended trying physical methods to relieve symptoms rather than medications, such as cool baths for fever that is going towards the level that causes seizures or permanent brain damage. I reassured parents with the confident assertion that they would be able to remove heat from their baby's body faster than he or she could produce heat, resulting in a net cooling. But for a middle ear infection I never hesitated to use appropriate decongestants and antibiotics, having in 1943 when I was a kid, before antibiotics were available to civilians, survived a week of extreme vertigo and delerium before being held down so the doc could lance my eardrum and let the pus out.

As a young physician I used to see a few older adults with large depressions over the mastoid bone behind the ear, where the bone had been scooped out after becoming abcessed secondary to a middle ear infection. The procedure was done to prevent the next step in the natural process, which was the development of a fatal brain abcess as the bone eroded through on the inside of the skull.

But in more than 35 years of practice I never saw mastoiditis (a term that used to strike terror into the heart of any parent who heard it) or a brain abcess in a patient, thanks largely to antibiotics.

I've heard it said that about 80% of people who are ill will get better so long as whatever you do doesn't make them worse. And is it 40% who will feel better when given a placebo? So with a sugar pill, a bear's gallbladder, an herbal remedy or dancing widdershins in a clearing in the moonlight most ill people will recover and could have done without ANY of that, much less allopathic medications or surgery. But for the seriously ill it may be another matter entirely.

My own strategy has been to avoid unnecessary medications, use currently recommended medications without hesitation, expect that for any medication new side effects may be discovered as time goes along, and stop using the medication if and when that happens.

From what Mark Cohen says, and he is more current than I, it does not appear that that time has come for acetominophen.

Doc