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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Taking antibiotics all at once could have serious implications for your liver. In fact even use of them in the way they are prescribed is a common factor in liver injury. Please don’t take antibiotics all at once ever.
Always double dose the first time… you have not residual active ingredients, and its best to achieve Minimum Inhibitory Concentration ASAP… always seek medical advice from experts.
With Lyme, the offending bacteria are spirochetes, meaning the burrow into tissue. Having a steady level of antibiotic in the blood stream knocks them off when they poke their little heads out. Simplistic, but accurate, I believe.
Its like trying to choke somebody. If you want to kill them you want to apply sustained pressure for some time. If you miss doses, that’s like getting them have a breath once in a while. And pressure all at once is not very effective either.
It isn’t the antibiotics that cure the infection. It’s the body’s immunity system but the immunity system takes time to ramp up about ten days. The antibiotics are to keep the germs at bay while the immunity system is ramping up.
Similar to why you can’t just drink a whole lifetimes worth of water at once and never have to drink again (assuming you survived). Your body can only use so much, and the rest doesn’t get “stored” for later use, it just gets filtered out.
Plus, antibiotics can mess with your gut biome if you take too much at once.
You’ll know the answer if you try to consume your week’s supply of anything in one sitting.
Pharmacist here. When thinking about why you have to do something for a medication the answer is almost always safety and efficacy.
Medications are studied and certain protocols are followed for the study. Your doctor knows a treatment is likely to be effective if that particular protocol is followed. This means the medication will be effective.
All medications can cause side effects. If you have too much of a medication it’ll be more likely to cause side effects. You will naturally filter out all medications in your body eventually, but if you take too much of something your body have a harder time doing so. This means there’s a lot of medication in your body which means you’re more likely to experience side effects. That’s the safety aspect of it.
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.
Some drugs affect only bacetria who are splitting in two. If one vacteria is just living, it does nothing. So you need long term exposure to be sure the ATB is there in the phase when it splits and that can take days.
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