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
If you finish the course all bacteria will be dead either by antibiotics or your immune system finishing them off.
If you don’t finish the course, some bacteria may survive and multiply again more than the immune system can handle. But now the bacteria are the ones descended from those that survived antibiotics treatment better than general bacteria population. Basically you made an artificial selection of bacteria resistant to that antibiotic and let them multiply afterward.
It’s not going to happen every time someone drops antibiotics early, but it may happen.
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