Why finish antibiotics

If you miss several doses or days of therapy for any reason, Dr. Skip to main content Search for a topic or drug. By Sarah Bradley Aug. Top Reads in Health Education. Diabetes and exercise Nov.

What is insulin resistance? World's most threatening superbugs ranked in new list. Oral sex spreading unstoppable bacteria. The opinion piece, by a team of researchers from across England, argues that reducing the use of antibiotics is essential to help combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Prof Martin Llewelyn, from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, together with colleagues, argues that using antibiotics for longer than necessary can increase the risk of resistance.

He suggests traditional long prescriptions for antibiotics were based on the outdated idea that resistance to an antibiotic could develop when a drug was not taken for a lengthy time and an infection was undertreated.

Instead, he says, there is now growing evidence that short courses of antibiotics - lasting three to five days, for example - work just as well to treat many bugs. He accepts there are a few exceptions - for example, giving just one type of antibiotic for TB infections - which is known to lead to rapid resistance. But the team says it is important to move away from blanket prescriptions and, with more research, give antibiotic prescriptions that are tailored to each infection and each person.

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View transcript. Why we finish antibiotics. If you have ever taken an antibiotic, you likely know the drill: Finish the entire course of treatment, even if you are feeling better, or else you risk a relapse. Worse, by not finishing, you might contribute to the dangerous rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The advice to always finish your antibiotics has long been considered medical dogma, and can be seen today on the websites of the World Health Organization, the U.

Food and Drug Administration and other leading health authorities. But the advice is wrong, according to an opinion article published today July 26 in the journal The BMJ. Llewelyn said the advice is, at best, overly simplistic. The idea that stopping an antibiotic treatment early encourages antibiotic resistance is not supported by scientific evidence, he said. Moreover, having everyone finish their antibiotics all the time may actually be increasing antibiotic resistance worldwide, because it's the taking of antibiotics for longer than absolutely necessary that increases the risk of resistance , Llewelyn said.

The original theory was this: Treating bacterial infections with an antibiotic kills those bacteria, but this may take a week or more to accomplish.