Finish your antibiotics course? Maybe just stop taking them when you feel better, experts say

British disease experts on Thursday suggested doing away with the “incorrect” advice to always finish a course of antibiotics, saying the approach was fuelling the spread of drug resistance.

Rather than stopping antibiotics too early, the cause of resistance was “unnecessary” drug use, a team wrote in The BMJ medical journal.

“We encourage policy makers, educators and doctors to stop advocating ‘complete the course’ when communicating with the public,” wrote the team, led by infectious diseases expert Martin Llewelyn of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

“Further, they should publicly and actively state that this was not evidence-based and is incorrect.”

The team said further research is needed to work out the best alternative guidelines, but “patients might be best advised to stop treatment when they feel better.”

The UN’s World Health Organisation says that if treatment is stopped early, there is a risk that antibiotics would not have killed all the disease-causing bacteria, which can mutate and become resistant to the treatment.