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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Keep in mind there a some situations where long courses are benificial still, like in the treatment of PANS/PANDAS.
Why do you wash a car by scrubbing it with only a small amount of the bucket of water over time and not just dump the bucket on the car all at once?
Because just throwing a bucket of water at a dirty car doesn’t clean it properly. It needs several applications to ensure that it is applied everywhere and effective.
Your body does its best to eliminate stuff that enters it. You could compare it to coffee; if you drink ten cups of coffee spread out through the week, your caffeine levels will not experience extremely high peaks but will somewhat stay within a certain interval. If you were to drink ten cups of coffee in ten minutes’ time, you will experience an extreme caffeine peak, but the effect won’t last all week long. Taking big amounts of antibiotics at once can be both harmful for your body (similar to caffeine and basically any substance if you take too much or it), but can also be less helpful in battling bacteria. The antibiotics have to be able to reach the bacteria to eliminate them, and the chance of that happening is bigger if there is a constant presence of antibiotics over a slightly longer period of time than when you have a truckload of antibiotics in you for a short amount of time.
The same reason you eat 3 meals a day and not a weeks worth at one sitting: your body can’t handle that much at once. It takes time to absorb the good stuff and let it do its job.
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.
You’ve gotten a lot of terrific answers. One thing I want to add is – PLEASE complete your entire course as scheduled. People stopping their antibiotics too early are contributing to antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria becoming more common.
You don’t want to create a whole strain of bacteria in your body that evolved from previous generations that were exposed to “a bit of antibiotics” and were strong enough to survive, as those successor generations will be even more likely to survive.
RN here: Most antibiotics are actually quite toxic to humans above a certain dose and with several serious side effects even when taken too closely together. If you took even one extra dose in a day for example you could be puking your guts out, having seizures, getting kidney damage, liver damage etc.
There are other reasons to spread out antibiotic therapy over several days or even weeks to months. But there are very very few infections that could be eradicated in a single day, even if the antibiotics didn’t kill you. The other huge factor here is that bacteria are living cells and it can take time for your immune system to clean up the mess. You don’t necessarily want every single bacteria dying simultaneously.
The penicillin shot in the butt is taken all at once but releases slowly. It’s really pain in the arse for 3 days. Ask anyone who has gone through basic training.
Oral medicines transfer (acids in stomache) to blood stream quickly and body processes them quickly. Requires multiple doses
Heard of a guy with a VD who was given tetracycline (an antibiotic) to be taken over a months time.
He took them all at once to get rid of the VD quicker, and admitted to the Hospital later that day.
Lol, I mean like any drug, you shouldn’t take the whole lot at once. If you had a bottle oxy, would you take all of it to get the “full effect”?
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