Antibiotic Overuse and Resistance

I chose to do my paper on antibiotic resistance. I chose it primarily because it is a topic that I am confronted with on a frequent basis by friends and family. Basically, I wanted to delve into the causes for antimicrobial resistance and steps to thwart it.

I discovered as we all know from lectures that a wide variety of bacterial strains are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics due to a combination of factors: inappropriate use by patients and too frequently prescribed antibiotics by healthcare providers.

Primary care providers are overly prescribing antibiotics due to pressure from patients, a fear of losing patients, heavy workloads (more patients means that there is often less time available to individual patients, so there is pressure to get them in and out), and demands to keep the public happy (happy patients equals more money).

The public is also to blame for their often inappropriate use of antibiotics. We are all knowledgeable about the importance of educating our patients on the need to take their full course of antibiotics. However, I stumbled across an article that stated that it is becoming more and more common for people to order antibiotics online without a prescription (self-medicating). Therefore, we are in a position to educate our patients not only on the reasons for their antibiotics and on the importance of taking them correctly, but also on the reasoning for their not being prescribed what they think is a necessary tool for getting better. They need to understand what determines antibiotic use or not (viral vs bacterial and broad spectrum antibiotics vs gram specific antibiotics). Other measures to control infection are equally important to impart to out patients (e.g., handwashing).