Parents Force Physicians to Prescribe More Drugs to Children

Antibiotic over-prescription is a very serious problem in the world today, but especially in civilized countries. Here, pediatricians often prescribe way too much medicines for children for a very harmless disease, and the trend appears to be accelerating every year, analysts say. According to a new study, it would seem that the doctors feel pressure from the parents in making a treatment decision, and that this is one of the main reasons why they have given the young ones such an abundance of drugs over recent years, PhysOrg reports.

“A wide gap between perceived and real determinants of antibiotic prescription exists. This can promote antibiotic overuse,” Maria Luisa Moro, the lead researcher of the new investigation, says. The new study was conducted by the Agenzia Sanitaria e Sociale Regionale Emilia-Romagna, working together with the CeVEAS-AUSL Modena, and the Regional ProBA Group, in Italy. Details of their investigation appear in a new paper, entitled “Why do paediatricians prescribe antibiotics? Results of an Italian regional project,” published in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal BMC Pediatrics.

“All of the above results confirm the crucial role of cultural factors as well as social factors in determining the pattern of antimicrobial prescribing in a region,” Moro continues. She reveals that the country has been registering a worrying number of drug over-prescription cases, and that this state of affairs could be very harmful to children. One of the main reasons why this should be avoided is because too many medicines can cause immunity in the children. They develop pathogens that are immune to the effects of antibiotics and, when a really serious condition befalls them, their immune systems are powerless to fight against it.

Some 56 percent of the pediatricians that responded to a poll said that drug overuse most likely stemmed from inaccurate diagnostics, or from the healthcare experts' own impossibility to figure out what diseases they were seeing before their eyes. Some 20 percent said that parental expectations were a determining factor in prescribing a certain course of treatment. What these doctors are essentially saying is that the parents push them into giving their children more medication, to get better sooner, unaware of the negative effects this has in the long-run. The results apply to other developed countries too.