I’m assuming it has to do with making sure you get any straggler bacteria, but wouldn’t taking all the pills at once shock and awe the little buggers and force them to surrender?
In: Biology
All medications have a therapeutic range and for it to work the amount in your body needs to be within that range.
Think of a graph with a straight line at zero. That’s how much antibiotics you have in your system before you start.
If you take antibiotics now, the level will rise above zero. Soon after we do though, our body starts to remove it, usually due to the liver, and the level starts dropping again.
Above zero is another line called the therapeutic level. This is the amount of antibiotics you need in your body to work properly. If the amount ever falls below this level it won’t work well if at all.
Then there is another line above that, called the toxic level. If the amount in your body goes over this line then the antibiotics will start to cause damage to your body instead of helping.
Between those two lines is the therapeutic range. That’s the range we want the level to have the best effect. Too low and it stops working. Too high and it causes damage.
So we have this line on our graph that jumps up every time we take our medication, and then slowly starts to drop off again. This is why sometimes we’ll take two tablets on the first day and then one every day after that. Two tablets bumps us right into the middle of our therapeutic range and one more every day replaces what we eliminate before we drop out the bottom of the range.
Understanding this, we can see that if we take a whole week’s worth of medication all at once we put ourselves really high into the toxic range and harm ourselves instead of just killing the bacteria we’re targeting.
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