how does not finishing a course of antibiotics cause antibiotic resistance?
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You can be infected by many things without showing any symptoms – your body doing is thing by controlling and suppressing the problem.
This means that if you stop taking an antibiotic at the point you feel better, you may still be infected, just with a lower dose that your body is capable of handling.
This leaves behind bacteria that have potentially been exposed to the antibiotic, but not killed – giving them a chance to mutate and adapt to resist it. Ideally this will then just be killed off by your bodies natural defences, but if some survive and manage to infect someone else, you now have a strain that is slightly stronger and more resistant.
If you complete your full course of antibiotics, it should hopefully have been prescribed to last long enough as to reliably kill off the bacteria fully, and not leave any significant amount behind.
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