So I know if you take antibiotics, and you stop once you feel better, can cause the infections to come back even worse and you might possibly develop a antibiotic resistance but what’s the difference between that and finishing your medication? For example, my antibiotics I take 2 a day for 7 days. How does finishing my medication not cause a resistance?
In: Biology
Antibiotic resistance is not an individual phenomenon. It’s a societal phenomenon. The same bacteria cannot be resistant to antibiotics in your body, while responding to them in mine. You might use antibiotics correctly, but if everyone around you abuses them, you are as susceptible to these resistant bacteria as everyone else.
When you take antibiotics the weaker bacteria get killed first, while the stronger survive. The stronger ones get to proliferate as they don’t have to compete for resources with the weaker ones. That’s why there is a risk of infections rebounding even stronger. To avoid that the doctor might have asked you to take a full course of antibiotics, so that the stronger ones are also killed.
However in many cases, your immune system is perfectly capable of handling the bacteria, it’s just overwhelmed with the quantity of them. In those infections, a high powered single or couple dosage of antibiotics is recommended. In fact you might not want to be on antibiotics for a longer period, because unless the antibiotic is extremely specific, it also wreaks havoc on all the beneficial bacteria elsewhere in your body.
Antibiotic resistance though is far more complex. It happens when people as a whole overuse antibiotics, spread the stronger surviving bacteria among one another, and the bacteria under constant pressure of antibiotics evolve over multiple generations to develop a resistance to the antibiotics. Then it’s a constant race between developing new antibiotics and the ever evolving bacteria.
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