Inappropriate prescribing

Webber, the principal of the Harley Street Centre for Endodontics, believes that the dental profession can play its part in reducing the risks posed by antimicrobial resistance. 

Webber estimates that for a significant number of dental patients with endodontic disease, antibiotics are prescribed inappropriately. If a correct diagnosis is made when a patient experiences their first symptoms, he says, the need for antibiotics should be minimal.

His comments are made in the wake of the annual report by Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies in which she warned of the dangers posed by drug-resistant bacteria, strains of organisms which cannot be killed off by the antibiotics available today.  Davies says that Britain's health system could slip back by 200 years unless the "catastrophic threat" of antibiotic resistance is successfully tackled.

As a specialist referral practice which works daily to save teeth through root canal treatment,  Webber and his team already operate to clear guidelines which are underpinned by evidence that antibiotics are not effective for pain relief in cases of irreversible pulpitis.