Trends of Antibiotic Use In the United States

Abstract

To the Editor.— In my opinion, on the basis of my personal experience since before the advent of the antibiotic era, the highly questionable formidable force of pressure, which you emphasize, was not, and is not, the primary cause of the frightful and very obvious misuse of antibiotics. Rather, and equally obvious, I believe it was our own widespread and glaring ineptitude involving abusive overuse of these drugs that originally spawned the boomerang of pressure. The patient is not to blame, and we must not further compound and expand the problem by seeking to make him the whipping boy while whitewashing the doctor, who is really culpable. I have not, for some 20 years, found it necessary or desirable to give injectable penicillin except in certain cases of venereal disease or in the relatively rare cases in which it was definitively indicated. I have prescribed oral penicillin and