As you can imagine, doctors initially got into trouble with this because there is no test that you can use in clinic that says "this patient just has a viral infection". Nevertheless, there are clinical criteria that we can use to come to the same conclusion, and the tide changed years ago with regards to inappropriate antibiotic use for routine viral illnesses.
It gets much dicier in-hospital when someone has a SIRS response and you need to presumptively treat them for sepsis.
I would be curious to know: of the antibiotic resistance burden that comes from human antibiotic use (specifically in countries where abx are physician-prescribed and not available over the counter), how much of this burden comes from broad treatment of presumed serious infections, and how much comes from treatment of presumed non-serious infections or even postsurgical prophylaxis?
Resistance is a funny thing: there's nothing specifically wrong with going nuts with the antibiotics provided everything gets dead.
The problem is much more with people who only take partial courses or are non-compliant, because if you don't clear the infection then round 2 is full of the slightly more resistant members of the species.
Sure, but my question is about epidemiology. Rather than assuming that most resistance comes from "bad"/noncompliant/non-adherent/choose-your-euphemism patients, it would be interesting to know what the current burden of resistance can actually be attributed to (separating out resistance due to livestock antibiosis, countries where people can just buy antibiotics over the counter, etc).
It gets much dicier in-hospital when someone has a SIRS response and you need to presumptively treat them for sepsis.
I would be curious to know: of the antibiotic resistance burden that comes from human antibiotic use (specifically in countries where abx are physician-prescribed and not available over the counter), how much of this burden comes from broad treatment of presumed serious infections, and how much comes from treatment of presumed non-serious infections or even postsurgical prophylaxis?