Why do we need to take antibiotics in a certain amount of time?
In: Chemistry
Say you take an antibiotic pill with 100mg of medicine in it (just a nice random number for easy math).
Pretty much as soon as you take it, your body starts to break down the medication and remove it. Either it getting broken down in your liver, or your kidneys filtering it out, or even just the medication breaking down on its own.
And for antibiotics to work correctly, you need to keep the levels of medication high enough in your body for the antibiotics to remain toxic to the bacteria. Let’s say you need to have at least 50mg of the medication in your body for it to work effectively.
So say after 12 hours on average your body has broken down half that original 100mg to 50mg, you need to take the next pill to get back above the threshold where it stay effective. This would be like a pill you have to take twice a day.
If you only took that pill once a day instead, that would mean that for half of every day the medication levels in your body were too low and were ineffective, meaning the bacteria were surviving and still multiplying in your body, making the whole treatment less effective.
The bacterium that is a leading cause of bacterial sore throat *Streptococcus pyogenes* contains a substance, the M antigen, that is similar to materials in human heart valves.
The germ is a pushover when it comes to penicillin, which is good. An infection can be brought under control and cured quickly so that the body does not develop antibodies to M.
Antibodies to the M antigen are the cause of [rheumatic heat disease](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rheumatic-heart-disease) which can dramatically shorten young lives.
If the doctor says take these antibiotics pills for 10 days, and you feel better after 7 days, you still need to keep taking the pills for 10 days. This is because there’s a chance that you are still infected but you just feel better, and if you don’t kill all of the bad bugs then they will start coming back and you’ll have to take even more antibiotics.
Its better to do 3 extra days of antibiotics than having to do 7 days then adding on another 10 afterwards because you didn’t kill all of the bugs the first time.
you are at war with the bacteria, after a few days of bombing them they stop attacking and you feel better, but to make sure their aren’t just hiding and getting ready to attack again you keep bombing for few extra days
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