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
When you first start taking antibiotics, usually the first round of it wipes out the majority of the bacteria that are damaging your tissue. Because most are gone, you feel relief. However not all of them are gone immediately, a few stragglers that may be a little more resistant are still alive, not enough for you to notice, but still present.
A prescribed course of antibiotics is designed to intentionally be overkill to ensure every last bacteria is obliterated. If you stop early and a few of those survive, the infection can rebound as those survivors multiply. Whats worse, since those survivors lived longer because they had traits that made them more resistant, as they copy themselves and multiply, all of the bacteria in the renewed infection will now have these traits, with a few possibly having developed an even stronger resistance through random mutations, and now instead of most of the infection being eliminated on the first round, most of them might survive that first round and the whole infection will now take longer to get rid of, or the antibiotic may stop being effective entirely.
Its in a way artificial selection. By stopping early, you have effectively cleared the way for only the toughest and most resilient bacteria to repopulate and potentially become even stronger.
People also discourage using antibiotics when you don’t have an illness that needs them because this resistance can be developed in bacteria that are normally harmless or easily defeated in or on your body, and in some cases two different species of bacteria can actually exchange genetic information, so a resistance can sometimes spread between multiple species of bacteria.
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