>>But now after a few decades of prescribing them for just about anything, even as a placebo (which miraculously cures many cases of hypochondria), and making huge money on mass-produced cattle variant, which went on for decades after the danger of resistant strains was trumpeted (I've been hearing about that since the seventies)..

Easy to point the finger but you yourself advocate penicillin for infections... I wonder what sort of infection? Unless you swabbed and confirmed strep, you're part of the overuse problem.

>> Perhaps the practice is different in your neck of the woods, but I've heard of cases where the doctors rather gave newer drugs (with bunch of side effects... cases in the wider family) instead of simple antibiotics. And, ah, yes - these newer drugs cost much more.

The big problem is that there aren't so many indications for cheap antibiotics these days. Ideally physicians would swab and confirm the sensitivity before prescribing... in real life it's often cheaper and makes the patient happier to prescribe on the spot. So you prescribe something that's likely to work. There are other issues- consider rheumatic fever that can result from untreated strep throat. It damages heart valves and should be preventible. If you were the physician, would you swab the throat and wait to see whether it's strep, or would you prescribe an antibiotic that probably costs less than the test? What if it were your child and the physician delayed for the test result and your child's heart valve was damaged? As always it's easy to sit in the bleachers and shout advice, not so easy if you're the dude with the bat.

>>This practice of doctors avoiding the good old generics in favor of more profitable new ones has come here as well - I've seen a case when a psych drug was administered to suppress hallucinations... while one of its side effects was "may cause hallucinations". And the list of these side effects was longer than the list of indications. The only sure thing about it was that the price was high.

That's anecdote from a position of ignorance- neither you nor I am competent to decide whether a particular unstated drug was indicated. And potential side effects are "potential" side effects. One potential side effect of antibiotics is diarrhea or proliferation of other sorts of bug- which by your logic would mean that antibiotics can't be used for gut infections.