As an Australian originally, this article is pretty hard to take seriously. I have a great many problems with Australia's medical system, especially the GPs-then-hospitals-with-nothing-in-between idea, but overprescribing drugs has not been one of them. If anything it's been the opposite, it's ridiculously hard to get anything out of a doctor there, especially antibiotics and double especially anything that could conceivably be abused in some way.
The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.
So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.
The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.
So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.