Antibiotics prescribed ‘blindly’, doctors admit
Cambodian physicians, by their own admission, routinely prescribe antibiotics “inappropriately” based on habit and poor hygiene rather than evidence of an infection, a new study has found. The article, published by peer-reviewed science site BioMed Central last week, included research gleaned from focus group discussions with 103 Cambodian physicians, and revealed that “antibiotics prescribing occurred in the absence of microbiology evidence of infection”. “Every day, doctors are not performing appropriately. We have made lots of mistakes with our antibiotic prescribing,” one doctor is quoted as saying in the report. “Nowadays, we prescribe antibiotics blindly,” another added. Worryingly, many doctors prescribed antibiotics “excessively” as a “preventative” measure, fearing poor hygiene in hospital rooms would result in an infection. “I’m always afraid, because everything is not clean and the patients are not hygienic, so we give antibiotics right away,” one doctor admitted.
