But how do you know whether the patient has a resistant infection before giving antibiotics? Are you suggesting every patient is cultured to find out what the underlying infection is before starting treatment?

From recent experience of being hospitalized with pneumonia, they were pumping me full of antibiotics and asking questions later. The culture on my sputum never came back with a clear answer even a couple days later. But they found an antibiotic that worked. I doubt I'll ever know what bacteria ultimately caused the infection. Clearly it was resistant to a few antibiotics that weren't working. Should they instead have left me with a 104 degree fever near death for a few days while trying to figure out if antibiotics would be effective or not, even though the culturing process might not even give a clear answer?

culturing and finding out underlying infection is a great way to ensure that we're actually applying the right medication! Eventually down the line we may have to do just that if we continue to give antibiotics indiscriminately.

It's going to be costly but we're "back-loading" our medical process so that we leave the problem to the next generation of healthcare providers.

It's like we want everything for free - get sick? just give out a ton of medicine! Eventually we have to pay for it.

Then we need a faster and more accurate culturing process. At least from my experience it was neither of those things, and it's hard to say we should leave someone with a potentially deadly infection to lay around for a couple days while trying to figure out what bacteria is infecting them.