Too Much of a Good Thing

If you're a doctor in China and you want to alienate your patient as quickly as possible, there's one simple way: deny him antibiotics. "Patients often say they want antibiotics even when they don't need them, and then they get angry at the doctors when they try to explain why the drugs won't help," says Dr. Tong Zhaohui, vice director of the respiratory department at Beijing's Chaoyang Hospital. To many Chinese patients, antibiotics are silver bullets: a cure for everything from skin infections to life-threatening lung ailments; and if a little is good, then more must be betterespecially if you can...