The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about half of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. Most of those unneeded drugs are given to treat viral colds despite the fact that antibiotics only treat bacterial infections—and not even all of those infections require an antibiotic.

The consequence of such overzealous prescribing is that more bacteria get exposed to drugs, giving them the opportunity to develop resistance. And subsequent drug-resistant bacteria can trigger difficult- or impossible-to-treat infections, which are now a critical public health threat. As many as two million people are sickened with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year in the US, and 23,000 of those die from the infection.

Getting doctors to simply stop overprescribing sounds pretty easy. But as data on failed public health campaigns shows, it is not. Simply reaching out and informing doctors of the ills of overprescribing don’t work, largely because doctors are already aware of the problem. Yet, due to other factors, they keep overprescribing. Those other factors may be lack of time to accurately diagnose an infection or pressure from patients who may see an antibiotic as a cure-all and demand a prescription.

As drug-resistance continues to render antibiotics impotent against life-threatening infections, it’s time for new strategies, public health experts say. And a strategy that may work best is none other than good, old-fashioned public shaming.

Past strategies “are all based on the assumption that physicians are rational agents who will do the right thing if provided proper information and incentives,” researchers Craig Fox, Jeffrey Linder, and Jason Doctor wrote Sunday in The New York Times. “But what if doctors are a little irrational, like the rest of us?”

The research team, along with colleagues, noted effective strategies that “acknowledge that people do not always behave rationally and are strongly motivated by social incentives to seek approval from others and compare favorably to their peers.”

One method had doctors display in their exam rooms a big, signed pledge to prescribe antibiotics responsibly. The method “pressured doctors to act consistently with their own publicly stated commitments” and cut antibiotic prescriptions by 20 percent. In another method, doctors were forced to write justifications for antibiotic prescriptions that other medical professionals could review. This cut prescriptions by 77 percent.

Lastly, one method used an automated e-mailing system to give doctors periodic scores on their prescribing practices based on electronic medical records. E-mails would bluntly inform them if they were "top performers" or not and rank their performance among peers. The peer-shaming cut antibiotic prescribing by 81 percent.