Last week, BBC News reported on a study showing that the use of antibiotics for sinusitis, for example, is useless. An analysis of nine trials published in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, revealed that taking antibiotics made no difference in the clinical course of patients even if they had been ill for more than seven days.

In the UK, it is the common practice of physicians to prescribe a course of antibiotics to sinusitis patients when the duration of illness exceeds seven days. Thus, in this instance, even if the prescription was presumed to be correct, the antibiotics were not properly used since they served no purpose.

Unfortunately, overuse by individuals, conditioned by advertising and their perceptions of doctors’ practices, is far more common than simply following doctors’ wrong orders. Especially in countries with weak pharmaceutical regulatory systems where antibiotics can often be procured without prescriptions, self-medication with antibiotics is quite rampant.

Even worse is the promotion and widespread use of antibiotics for agricultural purposes. With encouragement from big drug companies, livestock and poultry growers have been convinced that antibiotics are necessary to keep their stocks "healthy." This, they are made to believe, is an integral component of "modern" methods.

The danger of antibiotic overuse is not only that the drugs may have adverse effects such as allergic reactions on sensitive individuals. Of greater concern is the increased likelihood of enhancing the proliferation of microorganisms that are antibiotic resistant. When such bugs become disease-causing for human beings, this resistance to common antimicrobials necessitates the use of more expensive and often more toxic medicines.

In a rapidly urbanizing world, with a deteriorating environment accompanied by increased human mobility, the possibility of a global calamity arising from a newly emerged infectious disease is a sword over humanity’s collective head. The fact that such a disease would be resistant to known treatment methods is made likely by forceful efforts of individuals and groups who encourage excessive reliance on medications for every illness or discomfort.

Unfortunately, the neo-liberal thinking that supports such an unhealthy reliance is pervasive in many developing countries including the Philippines. Marketing and advertising dominate the information and communication channels within the society. The ruling elites in such societies are fully indoctrinated in the ways of globalization and worship ardently at the altar of free-market fundamentalism.

Unfortunately, despite the presence of so-called "democratic" institutions in societies like this, the choices are bleak. Locked in the battle for control of Philippine society are two sides of the same coin of trade liberalization, commercialized agricultural production, natural resource exploitation, and conventional economic development without a human face. Even more confusing for the people, most of whom are poor and have little access to accurate information, each side is atomized into factions that still belong to the same mold – the Catholic bishops are divided, the business cliques are disunited, the traditional politicians wear different stripes, and militarists have multiple camps. One objective describes them all and keeps them from uniting – self interest.

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But growing health problems attributable to neo-liberal thinking is not a monopoly of developing countries. In the very heart of free market commercialism, studies are showing that all is not well for poor people.

The New York Times recently reported that in the United States of America the gap in life expectancy between the rich and poor is increasing even as the income disparities between the same groups are widening. Even worse, according to the report quoting a demographer from the US Department of Health and Human Services, "the growing inequalities in life expectancy mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers." In short, as in the Philippines, the American rich are getting healthier while the American poor are getting sicker.

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Even as the Philippines continues on its erratic path to "technological competitiveness" through "medical tourism," health sectors in countries from where the patients come are warning about the dangers of medical procedures done away from home. At issue is not only the competence of facilities and health professionals in developing countries (including Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries) but also the medical logic behind having surgery away from one’s community and out of the context of an individual’s own health system.

In the United Kingdom, a recent survey showed that 20 percent of British citizens who took advantage of medical tourism offers in other countries suffered from adverse effects – most of them medically serious. While this kind of information will not necessarily put a stop to medical tourism, it will certainly keep it from becoming the source of an economic miracle for some poor countries which have not as yet met their own populations’ health needs.