The New Pushers
Here’s Dr. Jeffrey Linder of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston: “The right antibiotic prescribing rate for people with acute bronchitis according to current guidelines is probably zero percent.” Well, it turns out that doctors still tend to prescribe antibiotics for this ailment, and the same is true for many others. People get sick, they want antibiotics, and doctors seem as eager as ever to dole them out despite decades of efforts by public health officials to get them to stop. The overprescribing of antibiotics is one infection no one seems to know how to cure.