I’ve just started an antibiotics course which is 4 times a day for 10 days and that got me wondering if they would be just as effective if I took them all and why not.
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The same reason you drink water over the course of a week and not 10 gallons at the start of the week. Drinking that much water all at once would overwhelm your body and almost certainly kill you.
The same logic (through different mechanism) applies to medications, including antibiotics. Taking smaller doses over a long time frame makes sure your body doesn’t get overwhelmed by the dosage, allowing it to properly process the medication and allowing time to do what the medication needs to do.
For a specific example, let’s look at the antibiotic, penicillin. To treat a bacterial infection in an adult, a typical course would be 800mg doses every 12 hours for 10 days. This means over 10 days you will take 800mg *10 *2 =16,000mg of penicillin. (We multiply by 2 since we take it every 12 hours, i.e. 2 times a day).
If you took this much penicillin all at once you would get violently sick, (diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, etc), and it probably wouldn’t even treat the infection, since your body would process and remove all the penicillin quickly before it had time to work and kill the bacteria causing the infection.
Edit: Also, penicillin is not that toxic of a drug, if you were to look at something else, like pain medications, if you were to take a 5-10 course of pain meds all at once you would almost certainly overdose and die.
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