why should you always finish a course of antibiotics even if the infection has cleared up
In: Biology
A bunch of reasons!
Even if you don’t feel sick anymore, there are usually still some bacteria that take a little longer to kill. If you take your whole course of antibiotics, you will eventually take care of them, but if you stop too early, they could have a chance to start dividing again and you could get sick all over again.
Another reason is, if that happens, the bacteria left over from the incomplete round of antibiotics will be likely to be the ones who were a little better at withstanding the antibiotics you were taking – because they survived longer than the bacteria that died, their “offspring” will survive longer too, and maybe even develop resistance to that antibiotic. So now you can’t even use that antibiotic to treat your infection anymore, because it won’t work!
Finally, not all antibiotics work the same way. A lot of them will kill bacteria outright, but others are “bacteriostatic” – basically they hold the bacteria down so that our bodies can take care of them. But our bodies need time to develop a strong response to an infection, and if they are using a helper like these antibiotics, they may not be able to fight as well if that help is taken away too soon.
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