1 in 4 Americans make dangerous mistake that could help return to ‘dark ages of medicine’

Imagine a world where a scraped knee or common infections like strep throat would have a good chance of becoming deadly.

That’s a frightening future that doctors have been warning about for nearly a hundred years.

But more than one in four Americans — with the best intentions — are making a blunder that’s bringing us closer to this reality every day, a new study suggests.

Patients are overblowing their symptoms (or straight up fibbing) to their doctors in order to get antibiotics. Authors of a new study set out to find exactly how common this was, and why it’s happening.

It’s a first step in dodging a nightmare scenario in which bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, the medications designed to kill them, making infections harder or impossible to treat.

“If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine,” former UK prime minister David Cameron once said.

What researchers found

Almost 30% of 959 adults fessed up to misrepresenting symptoms to get antibiotics, a new survey study found. Most (65.7%) misrepresented symptoms related to a cold, like a cough or sore throat.

Of them, over 40% exaggerated symptoms — like telling their doctor they’d had a cough for 2 weeks when they only had it for 1 week.

About 7% lied about symptoms, like saying they had a fever when they did not. More than 50% of those who misrepresented symptoms did both.

Perhaps most intriguing is why people did this. The most common reasons were that they were suffering and wanted something to take away their symptoms — but also that they had to return to work or other responsibilities, and that they wanted to have the power to make medical decisions for themselves.

“It is a tough situation. People are experiencing unpleasant symptoms, and they can have this strong feeling that antibiotics are the only thing that can help them feel better,” author Alistair Thorpe said. “Being told to just rest and wait is a hard thing to do, and if you think there’s something that could make you feel better, it’s a very hard impulse to override.”

Being younger, feeling like the doctors didn’t take symptoms seriously, and believing that antibiotic resistance is a hoax were all associated with higher odds of misrepresenting symptoms to get antibiotics.

Authors emphasized that they don’t want to blame patients — they often have good reasons for misrepresenting their symptoms. They also don’t want clinicians to be more suspicious of their patients, either.

“How can clinicians communicate to patients the importance of not prescribing antibiotics when they won’t be effective, how can patients communicate in a way that their concerns and needs are met, and how can we help each other better understand the others’ perspectives?” said senior author Angela Fagerlin.

The ‘dark ages of medicine’

Antibiotic resistance is a global public health problem that’s been raising alarm bells since shortly after penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered.

Overuse or misuse of antibiotics kills sensitive bacteria, leaving the resistant ones intact, allowing them to multiply rapidly. Over time, antibiotics treatments become less effective against them.

Over a million deaths are related to antimicrobial resistance, and by 2050, that number is expected to reach almost 2 million a year.

A number of bacterial infections are already resistant to certain antibiotics, including those caused by MRSA, which can produce painful boils and abscesses, as well as some strains of E. coli and the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and gonorrhea.

Doctors are forced to switch to stronger, more expensive, or more toxic medications to treat them.

In some areas, hospitals have already had to weigh whether to treat cancers, because of a high risk of infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.