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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure it’s as true now as it was 20 years ago, but I do remember seeing several campaigns raising awareness of the risks of antibiotic abuse.

At any rate, you’re not necessarily contradicting GP. You can both know that antibiotics don’t help with viral infections and also believe that antibiotic use is harmless. Put the two together, and giving your kids antibiotics “just in case” seems perfectly reasonable.

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But in the US at least antibiotics require a prescription from doctors. So you need the doctors to play along, too, and in my own experience I’ve never received antibiotics unnecessarily

You can easily end up with leftovers from a prescription if stop taking them midway through the course once you're feeling better. Those left overs can then be used to self-medicate.

I could speculate on how else it happens, but the important part is that it does happen, and e.g. the Mayo clinic says:

> According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one-third of antibiotic use in people is not needed nor appropriate.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/consumer-health...

.. and this is one of the biggest sources of antibiotic resistance: people not finishing the course of antibiotics becasue they 'feel better now', rather than eliminating the pathogen so it can't gain resistance. Generally, there should never be leftover antibiotics.

As I understand it, there's been some recent studies that suggest it might be better to stop early (which is interesting, but that hasn't become standard practice, so I'll just keep doing what the actual professionals tell me to)

This is true in the US. In Brazil, my experience is that people expect a doctor to give medicine no matter what, even if it’s not warranted.

Major cultural difference to the point where Brazilians feel like American doctors aren’t even treating them.

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