Antibiotic Use: An Update - Page 3

What role for the Chiropractor?

For Doctors of Chiropractic, the situation provides us the opportunity to educate our patients on our paradigm of health: That health comes from within; that establishing function in the body allows for a state of health to express. In making informed health care choices, parents need to realize that simple preventive measures can go a long way in maintaining health and preventing dis-ease and that treating symptoms merely covers up the underlying cause. My next article will examine the role of the chiropractor in the care of patients exhibiting a number of these conditions.

Figure 1

Patient-Parent Factors:

• Anxiety
• Misconceptions about:what antimicrobials do
• Fever requiring antibiotics
• Belief in the healing power of the physician
• Economic concerns for patients (i.e., missing work)

Physician-Provided Factors:

• Real or perceived patient-parent pressure
• Economic concern for self (loss of clientele)
• Litigation concerns
• Physician fallibility:
• Inadequate knowledge
• Cognitive dissonance (i.e., knowledge but failure to act on it)

Managed Care Factors:

• Cost-saving pressures to substitute therapy for diagnostic tests
• Productivity incentives, reduced appointments time per patient, less explanation time
• Monitoring of rates of return visits to obtain prescription for antibiotic
• Responsiveness to patient complaints about "inadequate antibiotic use"

Cost-saving pressures to substitute therapy for diagnostic tests:

• Productivity incentives, reduced appointments time per patient, less explanation time
• Monitoring of rates of return visits to obtain prescription for antibiotic
• Responsiveness to patient complaints about "inadequate antibiotic use"

Sept - Oct 2002

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