One-quarter of antibiotic prescriptions aren’t necessary. And that's a conservative estimate.

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You probably have these bottles lying around your house, full of antibiotics you might not have needed in the first place.
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▼ It’s easy to think of antibiotics as a default first step in treating whatever ambiguous cold-like illness you have this winter. But in recent years, as we’ve come to fully grasp how dangerous  antibiotic resistance is, the healthcare world has tried to shift away from handing out prescriptions to everyone who walks in the door. Except it may not be going so well.
A new study in the British Medical  Journalestimates that roughly one in four antibiotic prescriptions in the U.S. are unnecessary—and that’s being conservative.
To figure this out, researchers dug into health insurance claims data to see what kinds of diagnoses patients were prescribed antibiotics for. Some illnesses—like streptococcal tonsillitis, bacterial pneumonia, or lung abscesses—they determined would pretty much always require an antibiotic prescription. Other ailments don’t always merit them, though. Inflamed sinuses, emphysema, and lower respiratory tract infections are just a few of those deemed to only sometimes require antibiotics. Finally, there was the never category—those diagnoses that shouldn’t ever be associated with an antibiotic prescription. Upper respiratory tract infections, asthma, and allergic rhinitis (inflamed nasal lining) were all in this last group. They note in the study that they erred on the side of assuming a prescription might be necessary such that their estimate would be conservative.
Of the 15,455,834 total antibiotic prescriptions they looked at, 23.2 percent were for illnesses in the never-needed category, making the prescriptions themselves inappropriate. A full 35.5 percent more were deemed potentially appropriate, being for diseases that might feasibly require an antibiotic. Only 12.8 percent were for ailments that always need one. (Perhaps most horrifyingly, 28.5 percent of the prescriptions weren’t associated with any recent diagnosis.)
The actual number of extraneous prescriptions might be much higher. For example, (▪ ▪ ▪)

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