In NewScientist (5 August 2017, paywall) Jessica Hamzelou reports doubts about the most basic of medical advice – taking your meds for a week or two:
In fact, it is the longer courses that cause problems. In 2010, an analysis of 24 studies, which included thousands of patients with respiratory and urinary tract infections, found that people on longer courses of antibiotics were more likely to develop antibiotic-resistant infections. …
So why do many prescriptions tend to last one or two weeks? When Martin Llewelyn at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK tried to find the origin of antibiotic prescription lengths, he struggled. “It appeared that people working in the 1950s arrived at these, probably because they were worried that people would otherwise skimp on treatment, or because they were afraid of resistance,” he says.
Antibiotics are often prescribed in multiples of five or seven days. This is probably because these numbers correspond to the number of fingers on a hand and the number of days in a week, but there’s no medical basis, says Llewelyn, who co-authored a letter on the subject published last week (BMJ, doi.org/b9z8). In fact, it might be a better idea to stop taking antibiotics once you feel better and symptoms are resolved, he says.
Well, that’s a bit disturbing. And after all that urging about not cutting your meds short, too.
