It's right at the centre of our minds when we're thinking about prescription drug misuse. That's why our board went out of their way to make that motion in 2012 that I cited. In fact, what we see with this drug is true, as you said Ms. Davies, about a number of drugs we prescribe. Our goal with prescribing is to bring our prescribing decisions closer to the centre of what science tells us should be done. The truth is, that's often astonishingly difficult. The easy example to point to is the use of antibiotics for viral infections. This is so common as to be almost a standard of care, and we believe it's common because it appears to be something that patients and families in our communities expect.
I'll tell one other story about a challenge around applying science to prescribing. That relates to my first foray into continuing education, which was around improving antibiotic prescribing. We know from science that, for instance, acute ear infections in kids over two years of age can be treated equally well with antibiotics and non-antibiotics. In other words, using watchful waiting for treating ear infections is an effective treatment. We undertook an educational program to try to make this scientific reality part of a standard of care. We thought the targets for that education would be physicians, of course, but parents and also, probably, pharmacists.
What surprised us when we dug deeper was that there were other influences on the prescribing decision that we had no idea about, the most important of which were day care workers and mothers-in-law! These are the people who influence parents around whether they would insist on a prescription from their physician, the day care workers saying things like, “Don't bring that kid back to daycare until they're on a prescription” or mothers-in-law saying things like, “What do you mean you didn't get a prescription from the doctor for that ear infection? Of course you need a prescription for that.” The lesson for us was that we have to thoroughly understand and thoroughly pay attention to all the influences attendant on all the medications we prescribe. It's not a simple decision.