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Nearly 30% of U.S. adults have lied to doctors in an effort to obtain antibiotics, either by exaggerating their actual symptoms or by fabricating symptoms, the results of a new national survey suggest. Additionally, in a second survey, about one-quarter of children’s caregivers reported lying about their kids’ symptoms to get antibiotics on their behalf.
“As clinicians, we know that patients lie to us sometimes,” Dr. Jeffrey Linder, a general internist and primary care clinician-investigator at Northwestern Medicine, wrote in a commentary about the survey findings.
However, the results are still important because the inappropriate use of antibiotics can contribute to the mounting problem of antibiotic resistance, in which bacteria build up a tolerance to the drugs designed to kill them. Recent data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlight the extent of the problem: In 2023, drug-resistant bacteria and fungi caused about 9.7 million infections in the U.S., up from 2.8 million in 2017. In turn, the estimated number of deaths caused by drug-resistant germs rose from 35,000 to 50,800 between the two years.
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A major factor driving resistance among bacteria is the misuse of antibiotics — in other words, using antibiotics for ailments like viral infections, which the drugs do not treat. For individual patients, such prescriptions don’t cure their illness and can result in an upset stomach or issues with the gut microbiome, the community of microbes in the intestines. Simultaneously, they place extra pressure on bacteria to evolve resistance, granting the germs opportunities to pick up new strategies for thwarting antibiotics.
Doctors play a big role in ensuring that the antibiotic prescriptions they write are necessary. Part of their decision-making process comes down to what patients say about their symptoms, some of which may be fabricated, the two new surveys suggest.
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The new surveys were published Friday (Oct. 30) in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The first survey was completed by nearly 960 adults from across the U.S. in January and February 2026. It asked whether the respondents had ever told a healthcare provider that their symptoms were worse or more long-lasting than they were in order to get antibiotics, as well as whether they’d ever made up symptoms for the same reason. It then inquired about what motivated a given patient to lie — or avoid lying, if they were truthful — as well as posed contextual questions about their demographics, health behaviors and beliefs.
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Overall, about 28% of the respondents reported misrepresenting their symptoms, including 26% who exaggerated their existing symptoms and 17% who fabricated symptoms. They most frequently lied about cold-like symptoms, such as fever, cough and sore throat. About two-thirds of these patients were at least moderately confident that their lie would motivate a clinician to prescribe them antibiotics, and 77% said the strategy worked for them at least once.
Often, patients’ motivations for lying centered around feeling very sick, holding strong beliefs that antibiotics would help them recover quickly and get back to their responsibilities, and wanting control over the treatments prescribed to them. Compared with people who didn’t lie, those who lied were also more likely to feel that clinicians didn’t take them seriously or more likely to endorse statements suggesting that antibiotic resistance is a hoax.
“Greater antibiotic knowledge and aversion to taking antibiotics were associated with lower odds of misrepresentation,” meaning lying about symptoms, the study authors noted.
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Less than 30% of these patients regretted their lies or taking the antibiotics prescribed to them. Those that did express regret noted experiencing side effects, noticing that the treatment didn’t help or feeling that the lying itself was morally wrong.
The second survey was much smaller; it included 236 parents and other guardians of children and teens under 18 years old. It posed similar questions but asked whether the caregivers had lied about their children’s symptoms and, if so, what motivated them to lie.
About 27% reported lying about a child’s symptoms to get antibiotics, with 87% of these caregivers believing that their lying worked at least once. Their reasons for lying were very similar to those expressed by the respondents in the first survey.
“These findings suggest that symptom misrepresentation may contribute to antibiotic overuse in pediatric care,” the study authors concluded.
Ideally, antibiotics should be used only when truly needed, to help relieve the pressure on bacteria to gain resistance.
(Image credit: CDC/ Melissa Dankel)
The surveys reached a diverse group of people, including a range of ages, demographics and locations within the United States; however, the respondents were not necessarily representative of the whole U.S. population, the authors noted. The prevalence of lying should therefore be seen as a tentative measure to be checked in future studies, rather than an unbiased, population-level metric, they wrote. It’s also possible that not all the respondents who lied disclosed that they did so or remembered that they had done so.
Doctors are still the gatekeepers
Especially in outpatient settings, which account for most antibiotic use among U.S. patients, it can be difficult for doctors to quickly determine whether a patient needs an antibiotic.
One factor is that there’s a lack of fast, surefire diagnostic tests for many bacterial infections. Outpatient appointments are also extremely short, so doctors sometimes worry about overlooking an infection that could then get worse, Julia Szymczak, a medical sociologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine, previously told Live Science. Another major factor is that clinicians can face pressure to prescribe antibiotics from their adult patients or from children’s caregivers, as the new surveys reflect.
But in the face of these pressures and patients’ occasional lies, Linder argues that it’s still up to the clinicians to do the right thing. “While clinicians might interpret patients’ symptom maximization and questions as demands for antibiotics, symptoms do not determine the indication, a diagnosis does,” he wrote in the commentary.
“It does not track that approximately 80% of respondents who reported misrepresenting their symptoms obtained a prescription,” he added, “unless prescribers were being willfully deceived or, more likely, just getting worn down with what they perceive as patient demand, regardless of actual clinical appropriateness.”
When it comes to making decisions about individual patients, Linder argued that doctors don’t necessarily need to think about the big picture of antibiotic resistance and how their patient’s case fits into that global trend. Rather, providers should simply ask whether a given prescription is more likely to help or hurt that patient, he said.
“Clinicians’ obligation is to act in patients’ best interest,” he said, “even if patients are hoping we do something different, even if patients do not like it, or even if patients lie about their symptoms.”
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.