I understand bacteria can mutate and develop resistance against antibiotics, but I do not understand how finishing an antibiotics treatment prevents this. In my simple thought process, when an individual bacterium has a mutation with antibiotics resistance, the antibiotics do not work on it. So whether I take 1 antibiotics pill or finish the whole treatment would not kill this bacterium, leaving it able to multiply later.
I am guessing the actual situation is either one of these things:
- The immune system itself, relieved of pressure by most bacteria being dead, kills the bacteria that developed resistance. Important note here would be that if the immune system is completely shut down, perhaps finishing an antibiotics treatment would actually INCREASE resistance as only the bacteria with resistance would survive. So I suppose this theory is wrong.
- Even individual bacteria only developed resistance which is not the same as immunity and bombarding it with antibiotics for multiple days still (usually) means that the bacterium dies.
Does that make sense or is there a thing I'm overlooking here?