Physicians
The view most considered in day-to-day medical care is that of the practicing physician. Physicians focus on individual patients and are motivated by professionalism that demands they seek the absence of disease, most often in persons who are ill when they visit a physician. Thus, the main economic problems that resistance presents for physicians are related to ineffective treatment (e.g., consequences arising from patient death, disease). From this treatment perspective, a production model of the type presented by Scott (3) would relate the existence of multiple antimicrobial agents to likely effectiveness in curing a given patient's infection. To clinicians treating individual patients, availability of more antimicrobial agents than needed would be of little or no concern. However, clinicians would be alarmed by absence of effective agents (the "postantibiotic era" cited frequently since Cohen's publication of that title [4] in 1992). From this viewpoint, the economic impact of diminishing effectiveness of a given drug or group of drugs depends on the availability of other drugs