3 ms·

The negative impact of not finishing antibiotics was news to me, and now I know. I think it's ridiculous to call him a terrible person. Uninformed maybe. Althou

The negative impact of not finishing antibiotics was news to me, and now I know. I think it's ridiculous to call him a terrible person. Uninformed maybe. Although that's no longer the case.

harshreality 15y ago
You pay a doctor to give you advice. The doctor says take these pills on schedule for X days [1]. You ignore X. Why did you bother going to the doctor in the first place if you weren't going to follow her advice? The only people who should be selectively following medical advice are people who have made an effort to understand the science behind the advice. The more serious the condition, the better your understanding of the treatment ought to be before you disregard advice. If a patient has a working understanding of what bacteria are, and how antibiotics work [2], then the patent understands why taking antibiotics for W (where W<X) days might be bad. The reasoning, roughly, is that fewer resistant bacteria will be killed, making you more likely to infect others with resistant strains between when you stop taking it on day W and when you become non-infectious. That sort of patient can do whatever she wants for all I care. She's likely to make a decision that's at least as informed as the doctor's. That type of patient would never ask why X matters. [1] Determining X on a per-case basis would involve way too much testing, so the medical community reaches a consensus based on studies (which may or may not be any good), and prescribes drug X for time T based on that consensus. Even if you could afford to get fast test results every few hours to monitor your infection status and see how well the antibiotics were working, and even if you could see what percentage of your infectious colony is resistant, you probably wouldn't want to. Spending that much time in a hospital or clinic is way more risky -- MRSA loves hanging out in those places -- than spending an extra day or three taking antibiotics even if fast accurate tests might show that you don't need to. [2] It's not binary. It's all about how different concentrations of antibiotics result in different rates of bacterial survival. In any colony of clinically significant size, there are going to be different rates of resistance.

The negative impact of not finishing antibiotics was news to me, and now I know. I think it's ridiculous to call him a terrible person. Uninformed maybe. Although that's no longer the case.

harshreality 15y ago

You pay a doctor to give you advice. The doctor says take these pills on schedule for X days [1]. You ignore X. Why did you bother going to the doctor in the first place if you weren't going to follow her advice? The only people who should be selectively following medical advice are people who have made an effort to understand the science behind the advice. The more serious the condition, the better your understanding of the treatment ought to be before you disregard advice. If a patient has a working understanding of what bacteria are, and how antibiotics work [2], then the patent understands why taking antibiotics for W (where W<X) days might be bad. The reasoning, roughly, is that fewer resistant bacteria will be killed, making you more likely to infect others with resistant strains between when you stop taking it on day W and when you become non-infectious. That sort of patient can do whatever she wants for all I care. She's likely to make a decision that's at least as informed as the doctor's. That type of patient would never ask why X matters. [1] Determining X on a per-case basis would involve way too much testing, so the medical community reaches a consensus based on studies (which may or may not be any good), and prescribes drug X for time T based on that consensus. Even if you could afford to get fast test results every few hours to monitor your infection status and see how well the antibiotics were working, and even if you could see what percentage of your infectious colony is resistant, you probably wouldn't want to. Spending that much time in a hospital or clinic is way more risky -- MRSA loves hanging out in those places -- than spending an extra day or three taking antibiotics even if fast accurate tests might show that you don't need to. [2] It's not binary. It's all about how different concentrations of antibiotics result in different rates of bacterial survival. In any colony of clinically significant size, there are going to be different rates of resistance.