You mention some things I know to be true. I have also heard the physician side, and they are under the gun by moms who simply will not take no for an answer.
Granted you could argue they should refuse, but that emphatic mom is going to find the physician who will give them what they want. It’s a no win for them when mom then runs around town telling her inner circle what a terrible physician they are.
And yet physicians refuse pain patients opioids every day. They insist that patients do physical therapy before surgery. They talk patients out of unnecessary tests.
Another thing that I’d like to bring up is the question, *why* are mothers so insistant that their kids get antibiotics with every sniffle.
Day cares and schools have a rule that a kid must be 24 hours free of fever before they can go back to school. If the school calls and the parent has to pick them up, the kids can’t go back the next day. Mothers are under pressure to get their kid well, and do it fast, so they can continue to go to work. Single moms without family support are in serious trouble in that regard. (You have no idea how many times I’ve heard mothers guiltily confess that they’ll dope the kid up with Tylenol right before school, praying that the kid makes it through the day.)
In Texas, a kid is turned over the truant officer, even if they have doctors notes. The district looses money if the kids aren’t attending. (I had to fight that with my diabetic son.)
So we’ve got several dysfunctions colliding at once. Moms who have to work, a school system that will call the cops if a kid misses too much school, doctors who don’t want to argue or educate, drug companies who aren’t working on antibiotics because there’s not enough money in it, twenty years of physicians not knowing about the resistance issue until it was too late, insurance companies throwing up roadblocks to see specialists to get procedures that would end the need for antibiotics in patients.
Let’s not forget that the rise of the AIDS epidemic has contributed significantly to the problem.
And then there’s the practice of treating all livestock with antibiotics, even when they’re healthy.
Blaming nagging moms alone is shortsighted and unfair.