antibiotic

Unnecessary antibiotics for toothache

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In the United Kingdom (U.K.) over half of all patients who visited their general practitioner (GP) with a dental problem in the last 10 years were not offered a long term treatment for their pain and instead were prescribed antibiotics. Some of these antibiotics were unnecessarily given. In a 10 year retrospective study published in the British Journal of General Practice researchers examined dental consultations and the resultant number of antibiotics prescriptions. The study found many patients are visiting their general practitioner rather than seeing their dentist, and that over half of these consultations resulted in antibiotics being prescribed. Many dental problems cannot be managed by a GP and this places an unnecessary burden on busy GPs. A severe toothache often needs an extraction or root canal which can only be undertaken by a dentist. The researchers were alarmed about the large amount of antibiotics being … Read more

Deadly Infection and Wisdom Teeth Removal

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I found a short snippet from the Wharton School of Business. The article addresses Wharton’s 2010 Business Plan Competition. One of the teams in the article is called R2R Therapeutics. The motivation for the team was 2nd year Wharton MBA student Bee Rhee who almost lost his wife due to a bacterial infection that occurred after the removal of his wife’s wisdom teeth. His wife was given antibiotics and they were able to stop the infection and she is currently alive today. However this business plan from this team does highlight a growing concern in healthcare which has to do with bacterial which is becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics. R2R Therapeutics’ goal is to combat these drug resistant bacteria by focusing on a novel cationic steroid antibiotic called R2R-1 which will work to disrupt the cell membrane and … Read more