A Review of Direct-to-Consumer Home Antibiotic Kits: A Threat to Antimicrobial Stewardship and Patient Safety.

Driven by the global wellness industry, pandemic anxiety, and increasing demand for telehealth, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) market for prescription antibiotic emergency kits has emerged. This review examines the clinical, ethical, and public health risks of stockpiling broad-spectrum antimicrobials for self-administration without guidance from a clinician. This model is a health risk to the individual consumers (adverse effects, drug interactions) and to the entire population (propagating antimicrobial resistance). While these kits are marketed as tools of safety and peace of mind, they represent an unmonitored public health threat. This article concludes with a call to action for regulatory bodies and medical societies to investigate misleading marketing and enforce stricter rules on prescribing antibiotics for future hypothetical illnesses, except in high-risk travel medicine contexts.