This is one of those topics where I feel very torn. Although not manufactured and formulated the same as antibiotics for humans, pet antibiotics do have the same active ingredients and in an emergency, might be lifesaving.

On the other hand, I fear that any sort of approval by me or other members may lead some people reading these comments to take these antibiotics whenever they feel like it and to use them inappropriately. I'm not saying that you will, CityBoyGoneCountry, but someone else may also think, "Gee, the doc gave me X last year for Y symptoms. My wife is having those same symptoms...maybe I'll just give her some of X pills from the pet store so she doesn't have to go through the hassle of taking time off from work to go to the doctor." That kind of self-diagnosis and self-medication can lead to all kinds of trouble--both to the individual, but also to the greater public at large.

Individual harm can come from obvious problems like a totally incorrect diagnosis of the problem even though you think you're treating something, using the wrong antibiotic that has no effect on your infection, bad side effects from the wrong dosage, possibly life threatening allergic reactions, etc. At the community level, things like the spread of antibiotic resistant bugs from misuse of antibiotics is a large and ever-present challenge to all healthcare providers.

Antibiotics in particular, really need to be used only in appropriate cases and taken with care. We don't have the luxury of prescribing them as liberally as in the past. The drug companies aren't cranking out new classes of antibiotics fast enough to keep up with the ever-increasing antibiotic-resistant strains. It's possible that we will enter a new age, within our lifetimes, where fear of dying from infections is again something commonplace. We occasionally got a taste of that fear from time to time, for example when HIV/AIDS first made headlines, during the anthrax attacks, or during the latest avian flu scare. Imagine that kind of fear all of the time.