4 ms·

Do doctors over-use antibiotics to save from being sued by patients in the case of an infection?

• dragonwriter 13y ago
  Doctors overprescribe antibiotics (among other things) to get patients out of the office.
• Fomite 13y ago
  There are a number of reasons to over-use antibiotics: 1. Patients ask for them. For a long time, the thinking went 'What's the harm?' in giving Mr. Jones some penicillin for what's probably a viral infection. 2. There is the potential for lawsuits, and the desire to have 'done something' to cover your ass, but I think this is widely exaggerated as a threat. 3. It's hard to diagnose many conditions. Like juries think all crimes get the full CSI treatment, patients often think doctors can just pop down to the lab and find out what you have, like in House. The answer is that's often hard, expensive, and failure prone. So they give antibiotics, especially broad spectrum ones, because of the subset of things you might have, antibiotics can treat some of them. 4. This is really 3b, but it's also possible, when you have no clue what your patient has, to try different antibiotics to try to get a handle on things. This...ends up using a lot of antibiotics. 5. Doctors, at their core, want to treat their patients. To make them better. They're trained to deal at the individual level - antibiotic resistance is a population level concern.