A new study has found that many Indian doctors continue to overprescribe antibiotics to children, even when they are unnecessary. Experts warn that this misuse contributes to rising antibiotic resistance, making common infections harder to treat. The findings highlight the urgent need for stricter prescription guidelines and greater awareness among healthcare providers and parents.
Doctors in India are overprescribing antibiotics for pediatric diarrhoea, even when there is no bacterial infection, research has found. The study, published in Science Advances, has pinpointed healthcare providers’ mistaken beliefs about patient expectations as the primary culprit rather than knowledge deficits. Researchers say it happens not because doctors want to fleece the parents but because the latter expect medicines that will work fast.
Taking antibiotics when needed is a serious problem across the world, as it leads to antimicrobial resistance, or AMR – when microorganisms evolve to resist the drugs designed to kill them. Experts believe AMR is making infections harder to treat and leading to increased illness, disability, and death in humans and animals.
The study also talks about a term known as “know-do gap”, which measures the space between what doctors know is correct and what they actually do in real life. Researchers said they found that more than 60 per cent of the doctors did understand that antibiotics were not needed for most cases of childhood diarrhoea, but they still prescribed them.
The study stresses the fact that if the doctors always follow what they already know, wrong prescriptions can drop by about 30 per cent. But if more focus is given on the training and information to the doctors, the improvement might be just six points.
Why do doctors prescribe antibiotics when they are not needed?
Also, researchers believe that till the doctors are not certain about the cause of diarrhoea, it remains a dilemma. If a doctor cannot tell right away whether the problem is bacterial or viral, they may give antibiotics “just in case”, especially in clinics and hospitals where good lab tests are not available.
How does antimicrobial resistance work?
- Preventing it from entering the cell or organism
- Pushing out drugs that get inside the organism
- Changing or destroying the medication
- Changing part of the microbe itself so it can’t be targeted by the medication anymore
- Developing a new way to survive or replicate that avoids interacting with the medication.