So you know how you should always finish a prescribed course of antibiotics because otherwise you are contributing to the spread of antibiotic-resistant organisms?
Yeah ... nope.
Rule that patients must finish antibiotics course is wrong, study says
With things like TB, it still applies. But for most uses of antibiotics, you should stop when you feel better, and taking more results not so much in resistant versions of the bug that was originally making you sick, but resistant versions of the common E coli, Staph aureus, etc strains that we all have in our skin or gut all the time.
Cites (full article)
The antibiotic course has had its day | The BMJ
Which includes
Quote:
Concern that giving too little antibiotic treatment could select for antibiotic resistance can be traced back to the dawn of the antibiotic era. When Howard Florey’s team treated Albert Alexander’s staphylococcal sepsis with penicillin in 1941 they eked out all the penicillin they had (around 4 g, less than one day’s worth with modern dosing) over four days by repeatedly recovering the drug from his urine. When the drug ran out, the clinical improvement they had noted reversed and he subsequently succumbed to his infection. There was no evidence that this was because of resistance, but the experience may have planted the idea that prolonged therapy was needed to avoid treatment failure.
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