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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Drugs have half-lives in the body, which means that half of the drug, no matter the dose, is gone in a certain time. If you take it all at once, “half” is a big amount which is excreted or broken down quickly, wasting lots of the drug. What you want is a relatively steady concentration of the drug over a long time.
Also, drugs have side effects, and an unnecessarily high dose will give you more side effects. Many drugs can even cause fatal poisonings when overdosed.
The second chart on this page shows how the concentration of a drug in the body rises, and then reaches a steady oscillation between two values, as you take consecutive doses: https://www.ama-assn.org/medical-students/usmle-step-1-2/kaplan-usmle-step-1-prep-what-s-half-life-investigational-drug
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