Prescribing antibiotic therapy in dental medicine is an everyday occurrence. Doctors of dental medicine prescribe antibiotics for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes. Indications for the use of antibiotics in dental medicine are limited and strictly specific. The use of antibiotics in the majority of cases is empirical, and is based on numerous clinical studies that defined the most common causes of odontogenic inflammation. Based on this, the medicine that is assumed to be most effective against the cause of the infection is selected, and these are mostly broad-spectrum antibiotics. Among the most commonly prescribed antibiotics are amoxicillin, amoxicillin with clavulanic acid and metronidazole, and in patients hypersensitive to penicillin, clindamycin. Irrational use of antibiotics results in higher treatment costs, higher frequency of unwanted reactions and a major problem today, antimicrobial resistance. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers antimicrobial resistance to be one of the greatest threats to public health. Although antimicrobial resistance is an inevitable and natural phenomenon, it is considerably accelerated by the misuse of antibiotics, and recognizing the right indications and applying the appropriate medicine in the appropriate dose slows down its development significantly. Doctors of dental medicine must know the basic principles of antimicrobial therapy and avoid the misuse of antibiotics in order to maintain the effectiveness of currently available medicines, because only judicious prescribing of drugs will slow down the emergence of antimicrobial resistance.