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Comment by dwightgunning | Hacker News Reader

In my experience living here, it's not only the farmers. Dutch doctors typically avoid prescribing general antibiotics (or advising anything stronger than paracetamol) to people.

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The article mentions this. There was this twisted situation in Netherlands where doctors avoided antibiotics as much as possible. At the same time farmers were using more antibiotics than necessary. The latter effectively undoes the effort of Dutch doctors to keep resistance to antibiotics low.

My wife's cousin owns a dairy farm in Germany and only uses homeopathic medicines on the cows. When I stifled a chuckle, he indignantly pointed out that not only does it appear to work for his cows, it isn't as if the cows can understand him, nor know that they are being treated.

However much I have my doubts about homeopathy, his cows seemed healthy and weren't being pumped full of antibiotics; hence I saw it as a good thing.

Homeopathy "works" because most illnesses are self-limiting. For example, homeopathics appear to treat the common cold successfully, with the caveat that they take about a week or two to take effect.

My understanding is that for the common cold, that's how "real" medicine works too. :-)

This is basically how homeopathy become popular in the first place. It worked better than what was currently available in regular medicine because it didn't work at all.

s/paracetamol/acetaminophen for US readers, who wouldn't know what paracetamol is. (Both names for the same drug)

Yeah, definite cultural difference from, for example, the US. But I'm pretty sure doctors there get money and gifts and whatnot from the pharmaceutical industry to supply large quantities of heavy pain killers.

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