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.
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