Persuasive Essay On Over Prescription Medication

In recent years, prescription drug spending has been on a constant rise. From 2008 to 2014, money spent on prescription drugs has increased from $234.1 billion to $374 billion. Drug companies made over nine billion dollars in 2012, and over 259 million prescriptions are written every year, enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills. This illustrates how the prescription drug market has been continuously increasing. This should not be the case with preventive care becoming more of a focus in the health care system people should be healthy, thus not needing as many prescription drugs. In fact, according to the CDC “1 out of every 5 children and 9 out of 10 older Americans reported using at least one prescription drug in the past month.” Further proving the point that an excess in prescription drugs is occurring among patients. Doctors should not be prescribing $374 billion in prescription medication a year. They should be obligated to protect their patients, but with the excessive marketing and over prescribing of drugs they create an unsafe environment for consumers. Doctors are neglecting their duties.

In order to better understand the issue of over prescribing we have to look at what it actually means to over prescribe. The medical definition for excessive prescribing is “to prescribe excessive or unnecessary medication.” Over prescribing becomes very wasteful

Antibiotics and similar drugs, together called antimicrobial agents, have been used for the last 70 years to treat patients who have infectious diseases. Since the 1940s, these drugs have greatly reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. However, these drugs have been used so widely and for so long that the infectious organisms the antibiotics are designed to kill have adapted to them, making the drugs less