Eli5 – why do you take antibiotics as a course and not all at once?

Question

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.

In: 674

Answer 1

Two problems with that idea: the first is that many antibiotics are toxic at high doses, and you’d cause damage to your body if you took them all at once; the second is that you want to be sure you kill all of the infection, and sometimes that requires exposing it to the antibiotics over a longer period of time.