Doctors want to please you. Can that be a bad thing?
Well, sometimes, yes. A really good example is at urgent care.
Don’t we all love urgent care, with its spanking clean, well-lit centers, where morning ‘til night, seven days a week, you can find a doctor - even for a splinter. So much better than the old days, where if you weren’t feeling well, you had to hope it was on a weekday, and during business hours so you could call your doctor and beg for a squeeze-in. Or for larger worries, off to the ER.
Something else is going on at urgent cares.
To explain, a story about my daughter. We were driving her home from sleepaway camp some years back, and for the entire four hour trip, she was inconsolable, saying that her ear was killing her. It seemed so dire. We didn't even go home; we drove directly to our neighborhood urgent care. The doctor was cheery, and optimistic, but within minutes, he handed me a prescription for antibiotics.
Problem is: most earaches aren’t caused by bacteria, which antibiotics make quick work of; they are caused by viruses which antibiotics can’t touch. And most earaches go away on their own anyway.
I never filled the Rx. My daughter went to sleep that night - and woke up fine.
Over the years, research has shown that antibiotics are the secret sauce, a primary driver for patient satisfaction at urgent care. That starts to matter to urgent care doctors - also E.R. doctors -- when their patients, unlike those of doctors who don’t have corporate overlords, are asked to fill out official patient satisfaction surveys.
The problem with unnecessary antibiotics is they raise the risk that you'll develop resistance to them, so they may not work for you when you need them for genuine infections. And they can fuel the rise of superbugs, germs that get stronger and stronger fighting off the medicine.
Just this summer, a comprehensive analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine looked at six years of urgent care visits and found that in 31% of cases, antibiotics were unnecessarily prescribed for earaches. Same for 46% of patients with genitourinary symptoms like urinary tract infections, and for 15% of patients with bronchitis. One reason the researchers cite for these misbegotten Rx’s. The pressure doctors feel about patients’ expectations.
That’s where you come in. When you walk into urgent care, please know it’s really okay to walk out without a prescription. Also, try to change your doctors’ expectations so they know you're not the kind of patient they might be accustomed to, and, rather than reflexively being handed an Rx, you prefer a few extra minutes to explain why a medicine may not be needed.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
