A recent study reveals that many patients won’t hesitate to tell a little white lie to get their favorite medication.
Researchers from the University of Utah and other institutions conducted a survey of people across the country. More than a quarter of those surveyed admitted to lying during a doctor’s visit in order to get prescribed antibiotics, they found. Unfortunately, these lies are not so harmless, as they can contribute to unnecessary side effects, inappropriate use of antibiotics and the growing problem of drug-resistant bacteria, researchers say.
“These findings signal an important issue for healthcare professionals who make antibiotic prescribing decisions and for the fields of antimicrobial stewardship and public health,” they wrote in their paper published Friday in JAMA Network Open.
A common deception
Antibiotics have improved medicine enormously since their discovery nearly a century ago. These medications effectively treat and prevent all kinds of bacterial infections, making everything from chemotherapy to cesarean deliveries safer.
That said, antibiotics should be considered a valuable resource, used only when absolutely necessary. This means we generally shouldn’t use them for mild infections that will go away on their own or for illnesses that are likely viral in nature (antibiotics don’t work against viruses). Unfortunately, studies have already shown that doctors tend to overprescribe antibiotics in these situations, and when asked why, they often cite a desire to meet their patients’ expectations.
According to the study researchers, however, there has been less focus on how patients communicate with doctors during these visits and whether or how often they might misrepresent their symptoms.
For this new study, the team partnered with Dynata, a commercial market research company, to conduct an online survey. The survey used demographic quotas to ensure a representative sample by age, gender and U.S. census regions, the researchers wrote. It recruited around 1,000 participants aged 18 and over.
In total, about 28% said they had ever misreported their symptoms to a doctor to obtain antibiotics. Among those who admitted to lying, 40% said they did so by exaggerating the severity or duration of their illness; 7% said they had simply made up false symptoms; and about 53% said they did both.
When asked why, the most common reasons were a belief that antibiotics would work well, that they needed to take responsibility as quickly as possible, and a desire for autonomy in how they were treated. The most common factors linked to lying about antibiotics included being younger (between 18 and 33 years old), feeling like doctors weren’t taking their symptoms seriously enough, and not believing antibiotic resistance was real.
A not so white lie
Of course, antibiotic resistance is a very serious problem.
Over time, many bacteria have adapted to the antibiotics most commonly used against them, forcing us to develop and use new ones in response. Humanity is now beginning to lose this escalating arms race, and drug-resistant bacteria (and fungi) have become one of the most serious public health threats of our time. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that superbugs kill about 50,000 Americans a year and that, by 2050, these infections worldwide could exceed the annual number of deaths from cancer. Although the fight against some drug-resistant infections has had some success, in part due to better antibiotic stewardship by doctors and hospitals, society as a whole continues to massively misuse these drugs.
Besides drug resistance, antibiotics are also not without direct risks. People who use antibiotics unnecessarily may experience side effects and complications like other infections related to antibiotic overuse, such as Clostridioides difficile (broad-spectrum antibiotics can harm healthy bacteria in our gut, allowing C. difficile to sow trouble), note the researchers. And often these medications are even completely useless, such as for upper respiratory infections, also called colds, because they are usually caused by viruses.
All this to say: as innocent as it may seem to fudge the truth here and there to obtain antibiotics, it comes at a real cost.
Gn Health
