Sepsis is medicine's last remaining preserve for unrestrained antibiotic prescribing. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines recommend empirical broadspectrum therapy within one hour of triage for both sepsis and septic shock. 1 This recommendation, and mandates that compel it, encourage clinicians to adopt an approach of "treat first, ask questions later" for patients with any possibility of serious infection. This approach fails to account for the difficulties clinicians face with diagnosing infection, especially when patients initially present to care, and the high rate of overdiagnosis of sepsis, and thus risks promoting excess antibiotic use and causing unintended harm.The recommendation to treat quickly and aggressively may seem sensible because sepsis and septic shock are potentially deadly conditions. Delays in appropriate antimicrobial therapy have been associated with higher mortality rates, and quality improvement initiatives that encouraged earlier prescribing have reported substantial decreases in mortality. Many of the studies supporting these assertions, however, may be biased. Most of these investigations failed to account for VIEWPOINT