Antibiotics are not candy as many people can attest. On my mission (brazil early 2000's) however we were given antibiotics every 6 months to kill off any parasites we were accruing. I think it was just crazy all these missionaries would come out of the woodwork all over the state and recieve their medicine at mission conferences.

That's not to mention the prescribing of medicines that took place when you were really ill but only put a phone call in to the mission presidents wife instead of seeing a doctor. She would prescribe stuff like she knew what she was doing. Seeing as most doctors don't know what they are doing, I would hardly think the mission presidents wife qualifies as a good source of help.

I became sick and still suffer from medical problems from my mission. I was given various drugs without seeing a doctor including one that was illegal in the US. Some of this was done without medical tests or seeing a doctor, as antibiotics can be bought without prescription in Brazil.


I'm curious how the church handles sickness now on missions. Has anything changed since 2002? Is it still at the discretion of the mission president on who goes home (or was it ever?) I would think it's a possible court case, but what do I know.

People think they're so harmless. They are serious medicine... Wonderful when needed, but they CAN have horrendous effects. I had a legitimately prescribed antibiotic bite me in the @$$- literally. I wound up with a life-threatening illness called Clostridium Difficile Colitis and I'm still feeling the effects 2 years later.

That person who handed out antibiotics like candy should be in freakin' jail for practicing medicine without a license and whatever other charges apply.

Don't take it as advice haha, but I hear feces transplantion is being used on that now. Like Stephen Colbert say's you can literally " eat sh&t and live".

We heard about it and when I was so very sick my sweet husband, The Best Man Ever™, volunteered to donate! "T'wouldbe easy," he said,"After all, I've been giving you $Ħ!† for nearly thirty years anyway!"

My cousin served a mission in south Carolina and got some eye problems while he was riding his bike. The mission president send him to an eye doctor and my cousin got treated. His eyes are fine now.

That is what farmers do to their livestock...

linesinker - what types of problems did you have on your mission and what types of problems do youstill have?

Digestive problems

specifically I had a bacterial infection, although I had a parasite and amoeba a little later on also.

In the 80s the missionaries in Brazil received gamma gobulin (I know I spelled it wrong) shots. Not a bad thing in and of itself. But they had a Sister Missionary administer the shots and she used the same needle over and over. At the direction of the Mission President.

We got gamma globulin in my mission too in the mid 1980s. It had safe storage temperatures on the label that were NEVER followed and the shots were given by elders with no medical training, but... at least there were no shared needles that I know of. It was used to decrease risk of hepatitis A infection. There's a specific vaccine for that now. In fact, I'm in the middle of a fight with my insurance provider because I started the hepatitis A sequence and now they don't want to pay for it.

Why would an antibiotic be prescribed for a parasite, unless it's bacterial?

This is why MRSA and other bacteria are developing resistance to these drugs.

You're totally correct, that's my own error. They are actually anti-parasitics.

In Spain, back in the day, antibiotics were an OTC medication and the MP would just tell us to run get some if we thought we had something serious like bronchitis or strep. No doctor or prescription necessary. It worries me now that I'll just develop an immunity, because I've had a lot of antibiotics since then, and plenty on my mission and only now am I realizing how bad overuse is.

Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, not your body. So, unless you stop taking an antibiotic for a specific infection before you've finished the full course and then restart it (giving that particular bacteria a chance to develop resistance to that antibiotic), or you aquire a new infection with a bacteria that has developed resistance to antibiotics due to overuse of antibiotics by everyone in general (like some strains of TB that have become resistant), you shouldn't have a problem.