The Half-Finished Prescription: How Skipping Doses Breeds Superbugs:
We all know someone who has, or we’ve done it ourselves. Your sore throat pain goes away, your fever comes down and you feel like you again. So you leave the last three days of antibiotics in the blister pack. It looks harmless, we know the dangerous truth behind this habit. Every missed dose is a training course for the bacteria.Here’s exactly how incomplete antibiotic courses turn treatable infections into deadly superbugs.
War of the Bacteria: Survival of the FittestOnce an infection takes hold, you have a population of billions of bacteria. These bacteria are not the same, with varying degrees of resistance.
The Weak: Highly susceptible bacteria, dying within 24-48 hours of treatment. The Resilient Bacteria of intermediate strength that need prolonged drug exposure for eradication.
The Tough: The bacteria that are very resistant to the drug. They need the full, multi-day dose to kill.If a patient stops taking their antibiotics prematurely because they “feel better”, they have only killed the weak bacteria. The hard, very resistant strains survive.
From Survivors to Superbugs when the antibiotic pressure is lifted too early, the bacteria that survive don’t just hang around, they grow.The survivors resistant to duplication .DNA Swapping Bacteria can actually swap resistance genes with completely different species of bacteria through horizontal gene transfer**.**
Failure of treatment: The infection comes back, but the original antibiotic doesn’t work anymore. We are the last line of defense against antimicrobial resistance. 
The patient now has a drug-resistant “superbug”. Stress that feeling better means the drug is working. It does not mean the infection is gone.
What do you think about this? For pharmacists working in pharmacies or on hospital rotations: How do they get patients to take the full course of antibiotics? 
MBH/PS