The groups approached various points on the topic of antibiotics:.
• Familiarity.
• Importance.
• Legal Issues.
• Practice.
• Education.
The points mentioned by the above mentioned groups were further consolidated by a questionnaire handed out to a number of people. Both the groups and the questionnaires' statistics were used in this article.
It is easy to see that antibiotics are misused as a general rule. It is not surprising therefore to find out that although the majority of lay people have some knowledge on side effects and the topic of resistance, overall they lack the knowledge of what exactly is, and what is the proper use of antibiotics. It is from this lack of knowledge that the problems arise. People do not comply not because they don't want to but because they do not understand the proper use of antibiotics. Examples of such are people that stop as soon as they feel better because they are afraid the antibiotics would do them harm. Such lack of knowledge has the worst effect when it comes to the topic of resistance. Not taking the complete course may result in a prolonged illness at the worst, but other factors may increase the levels of resistance to an antibiotic. Under use can be directly linked to un-education, when one sees that a large number of people see antibiotics as miracle drugs. This leads to many people loosing faith in them if they do not work immediately (antibiotics take time to boost the body's immune system) and so leading to non compliance. The attitude to miracle drugs' also may lead to also overuse. The main problem is the problem of overuse due to self-administration. Some people think that antibiotics are on par with Panadol ®, Night Nurse, etc, that may be taken when one is feeling poorly. Mothers tend to say that they know their children more than the G.P and so administer antibiotics themselves. Others put pressure on the G.
