Abstract
This study is a systematic review of cultural narratives that drive American belief in the value and efficacy of stocking up on fish antibiotics for human consumption. Popularized by “doomsday prepper” forums and survivalist medical professionals' online videos, this narrative suggests that in some scenarios humans may benefit from such treatments—even as they note its contraindication to mainstream public health advice. Discussions in crowd-sourcing forums however, reveal that in practice Americans are using them as a form of home remedy to treat routine infections without missing work or to make up for gaps in insurance coverage. This article argues for greater attention to what makes it plausible and reasonable to treat human conditions with animal medications. It suggests that public health initiatives should address such decisions as emerging from a rational analysis of social and economic conditions rather than dismissing such practices as dangerous to population and individual health outcomes. As social scientists of medicine have long argued, collective narratives about health and medicine illustrate deeply the broader contexts in which communities understand and experience bodily state and shape how communities interact with public health institutions and respond to medical expertise. This study surveys online discussions about “fish mox” to show how participants contest medical expertise and promote a more distributed form of populist expertise. As such, consuming fish mox is both panacea for health inequality and a critique of health institutions for perpetrating such stratification.
Highlights
While Briggs‟ discussion of communicability stresses the power of official institutions to define and manage public health [5] his work speaks to the broader phenomena in which information is transformed into authoritative knowledge through alignment with a community‟s core and collective beliefs
They draw upon three related core propositions about contemporary American social, political, and economic life that are confirmed by individuals‟ experience: (1) an expectation that pharmaceuticals act the same way on microbes in animal and human bodies; (2) a skepticism of professional expertise and institutional distrust; and (3) a deep belief that pharmaceutical and medical institutions are key to the perpetration of health-based inequalities
Systematic analysis of fish mox users‟ narratives about their consumption reveals that they mirror deeply American cultural logics about inequality and medical institutions and are rendered authoritative knowledge via populist expertise
Summary
The title of this blog post by “Dr Bone”—the nom de plume of Joseph Alton, a retired doctor described as one of the leading experts of medical disaster preparedness—reflects a common rhetorical framing of online discussions about “fish mox” (a veterinary equivalent of amoxicillin). Disaster prepping expert sites like Dr Bone‟s Doom and Bloom or that of Patriot Nurse cautiously recommend stock piling fish mox instead—but only for consumption when one will (presumably) not be able to get to a doctor or obtain drugs. Trusted experts in these virtual communities promote stocking up on fish mox in anticipation of future disaster, even as they note its contraindication to mainstream public health advice and caution against using veterinary equivalents in so-called normal times. While there is scant data about the prevalence of fish mox consumption (as opposed to talk about consumption), this practice should matter to public health practitioners given concerns about product safety as well as the risks of misdiagnosis, incorrect dosing, drug interactions, side-effects, and increased drug resistance globally [2]
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