how does not finishing a course of antibiotics cause antibiotic resistance?
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If you take most of the antibiotics but stop early, it might not kill *all* of the bacteria you’re infected with. Maybe 90% of them die, so you feel better, but 10% are left alive.
…but not just a random 10% survived. It’s the 10% that are most-resistant to the antibiotic. So now your body is carrying bacteria *that aren’t as easily killed by that antibiotic*, and you can pass those out into the world where they can infect other people. And those people will find that antibiotics don’t work very well for them, since they’re infected with ones that are all descended from the resistant ones you let escape instead of killing them. So now they need a bigger dose of antibiotics.
After many cycles of this, bacteria get more and more resistant, and can eventually become completely immune to a given antibiotic. Which is *really* bad because we only know of so many antibiotics and it’s really hard and expensive to come up with new ones. And if we run out of antibiotics, the treatment for an infection is going to become amputation again like it was in the old days.
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