This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Emergency Medicine  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Although a small study, the article by Lautenbach et al¹ underscores the alarming prevalence of inappropriate fluoroquinolone use in a sample of emergency departments. Particularly in the setting of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the widespread use of fluoroquinolones has led to emergence of not only resistant pneumococci, but also a host of gram-negative organisms that often have nothing to do with the cause of a patient's pneumonia.² One of the problems of influencing practitioners treating CAP to limit the use of fluoroquinolones to those deemed appropriate for such therapy¹ is the lack specific recommendations for the treatment of CAP by guidelines published by the American Thoracic Society and Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). In outpatient CAP, the IDSA recommends doxycycline, a macrolide, or a fluoroquinolone in no specific order of preference.³ In stable, hospitalized patients, the American Thoracic Society recommends an intravenous -lactam plus an intravenous or oral macrolide, or . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Nonspecific Guidelines Lead to Inappropriate Fluoroquinolone Use—Reply
Ebbing Lautenbach, Lori A. Larosa, Nishaminy Kasbekar, Helen P. Peng, Richard J. Maniglia, and Neil O. Fishman
Arch Intern Med. 2003;163(13):1618.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT