Does Finishing Your Antibiotics Really Reduce Resistance?

The importance of making sure to finish all of your prescribed antibiotics, even after your illness seems to be over, is something that doctors constantly are emphasizing on patients. This is to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance, which is now being considered a serious health threat all over the globe.

However, a group of researchers from the United Kingdom are saying that along with there being no actual evidence that supports this medical advice, it could actually be contributing to the antibiotic resistance epidemic.

Most doctors during their medical school teaching were taught to tell their patients to always finish their antibiotics. Dr. Tim Peto, a disease specialist at the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre who worked closely with the research team added to that saying, “It’s part of the medical school teaching, it’s in national guidelines. It’s embedded everywhere.”

The goal of the research team, which comprised of nine experts in infectious diseases, microbiology, health psychology and epidemiology, plus a project manager, from British universities and hospitals, was to analyze how to reduce antibiotic resistance. Their paper suggested that having patients take the antibiotics for longer than they need to results in an increase of consumption and raises the resistance risk.

When the team searched for scientific research to back up the famous notion, nothing could be found.

Dr. Andrew Morris, director of the antimicrobial stewardship program at Mount Sinai Hospital and University Health Network in Toronto, agrees that physicians have long been telling patients to take antibiotics for longer lengths of time based on no scientific evidence.

“Resistance primarily emerges when bacteria are exposed to antibiotics,” he said. “So the longer bacteria are exposed to antibiotics, the greater the risk of resistance developing.”

He and the research team in the United Kingdom are not the only ones who think this way. This February, Canadian health reporter Helen Branswell published a story on a Boston-based health website that was quoting infectious disease experts in the U.S. that were advocating for doctors to halt with the current advice they were giving patients on the topic of antibiotic use. Various groups of people and individuals are now beginning to question if finishing antibiotics is doing more harm than good.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated their public guidelines back in November 2015, removing a paragraph that said, “by taking the full course prescribed by your doctor, even if you start to feel better earlier, you increase the chances of killing all of the bacteria and reduce the risk of resistance.”

The current WHO guidelines tell readers now that “feeling better, or an improvement in symptoms, does not always mean that the infection has completely gone. Your doctor has had years of training and has access to the latest evidence — so always follow their advice.”

Despite the current uproar and this discovery by the U.K research team, public health agencies globally, including Canada, still are continuing to promote the message that patients must always finish their full course of antibiotics. The “prevention of antibiotic resistance” page of Health Canada’s website writes, “even if you feel better, finish your antibiotics as directed to make sure that all of the bacteria are destroyed.”

Artwork in this article was found by Waleed Sawan.

About The Author:

I’m a grade 10 student from Richmond Hill, Ontario. I wrote this as a healthcare journalist for Clinalleve, which serves to passionate pharmacy students and pharmacists with service-driven pharmacies.

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