A new study reveals that a huge number of doctors still prescribe unnecessary antibiotics to sore throats and bronchitis even if they knew that both are unresponsive to the treatment.
Jeffrey Linder, lead author of the study and a researcher in the division of general medicine and primary care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, wrote that the antibiotics prescription rate are 60 percent for sore throats and 73 percent for bronchitis. This is way to high from the acceptable rate.
"For sore throat, antibiotics should be prescribed about 10 percent of the time,” Linder wrote.
Linder and his colleague Dr. Michael Barnett studied the changes in antibiotic prescription for sore throat and acute bronchitis from 1996 to 2010. It included about 92 million adults with sore throats and 39 million adults with acute bronchitis that were attended to in emergency rooms or clinics.
They discovered that the rate of people seeking medical attention for sore throat decreased by 3.2 percent from 7.5 percent in 1997. However, the rate at which antibiotics are prescribed remained the same.
Additionally, the rate of visits to emergency rooms for acute bronchitis increased by 2.3 million -- from 1.1 million in 1996 to 3.4 million in 2012 and antibiotic prescriptions for the said illness increased by four percent from 69 percent.
Linder added that even if the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention promotes the proper use of antibiotics, the rate of the use of antibiotics for sore throats has only decreased by 10 percent from 1990 up to now.
He added, "The story for bronchitis is even bleaker. The antibiotic prescribing rate was 73 percent and the right prescribing rate for bronchitis, according to guidelines, is zero. That hasn't changed at all over the last 30 years."
The researchers think that the high rates are because doctors don’t want a more serious condition like strep throat or pneumonia.
Antibiotics tend to kill the normal flora of some parts of our bodies, thus resulting to other infections like diarrhea, allergic reactions and yeast infections for women.
The study about sore throat prescription rate was published in the October 3 issue of the online journal JAMA Internal Medicine while the report for bronchitis will be presented on October 10 at ID Week 2013 in San Francisco.
