12-25-2025, 08:08 AM
I'm a general practitioner in a community clinic, and I'm increasingly frustrated by the number of patients presenting with simple UTIs or skin infections that don't respond to first-line antibiotics. I follow prescribing guidelines, but I suspect community-level antibiotic resistance is becoming a more immediate problem than we're acknowledging. For other primary care doctors, how are you adapting your empiric treatment choices in light of these trends? What diagnostic tools, like rapid culture or sensitivity testing, have you found practical and cost-effective to implement in an outpatient setting to guide therapy? I'm also interested in strategies for patient education to reduce demand for antibiotics for viral illnesses, which remains a significant challenge.