I’m sick. Upper respiratory stuff, nothing serious. On Nyquil/Dayquil and a round of antibiotics.
Both the quils and the antibiotics labels instruct me to take the medications every 8 hours or every 12 hours, respectively. But I figure there’s no harm in speeding them up a bit. The antibiotics are a little vaguer than that–they say to take twice daily, so I figure there’s absolutely no danger in taking a pill every 11 1/2 hours or even every 10 hours. So I have two questions:
am I doing anything positive by effectively increasing the amount of these medicines in my system? That is, by taking a slightly sped-up amount of antibiotics than the instructions specify, am I getting more benefit than if I waited for exactly 12 hours between dosages?
am I doing anything negative by taking the antibiotics such that I’m on them for 6 1/2 days rather than the full 7 the doctor prescribed?
Or am I doing nothing by taking the dosage and the timing less seriously than instructed? That’s what I suspect–“It doesn’t matter, they don’t calibrate these things so precisely to begin with”–but I’m curious.
And antibitics should be taken at regular as possible intervals. The medicine needs to be at a level that works optimally in your body.
Take them at the same time everyday.
If you have a virus it really doesn’t matter. Antibiotics can’t cure those.
That’s what I’m asking. “Twice a day” is vague enough that I suspect they don’t really know what works optimally in my body. If I take one pill at 9 AM and the other at 6 PM, that’s “twice a day” isn’t it? If it were important that I take them every 12 hours like clockwork, I’d imagine they’d say something far more specific than “twice a day.”
The interpersonal variability in plasma levels of medications can vary a lot, based on things like age, body composition, interaction of other meds taken concomitantly, liver and kidney function, and genetic differences in the CYP450 system.
One of my professors had the door of his office covered in science-oriented cartoons, and one of them showed a big rally and the signs said “BAN P450”. This enzyme system had just recently been discovered, and we didn’t know about the subtypes, of which there are many.
Anyway, if it says twice a day, it’s best to take it every 12 hours, but if you can’t do it on the dot, being a few hours off won’t hurt you. If it’s easiest to remember if you take it, for instance, with breakfast and supper, it’s better than not taking it at all.
Well, bodies vary. So no, they don’t know what works optimally foryou. And honestly, they pick a plausible dose and study it, and if that works, that’s what they recommend. Sometimes they pick a couple of plausible doses to study. But they’d have studied 1mg, 2mg, 4mg, and 8mg. They didn’t compare 2mg to 2.1mg. is slightly more better? It’s it no better but slightly more toxic? I doubt anyone knows.
But when meds say “twice a day” it may be that the half life of the medicine in your body is long enough that the precise timing is unimportant. Taking them over 6.5 days instead of 7 may, nonetheless, matter.
Why is it that you are taking them every ten hours? At first , I though you were talking about taking them “off-schedule” - maybe I take one every 12 hours at 8am and 8pm , but I forgot and took it at 9:30 this morning and then I take the second one at 8pm to get back on schedule even though it isn’t quite 12 hours but now it sounds like you are talking about deliberately taking a dose every 10 hours.
I’m thinking I can safely up the dosage a tad, maybe benefit from having more antibiotics in my system than recommended without doing myself any harm. But if there’s a problem in getting only 6 1/2 days instead of the full 7, then maybe not such a good idea.
All the elements I mentioned above will determine how long the medications stay in your system.
Without being able to quantify all those elements (or without specific testing to determine how much of any drug is in your system), it’s really anybody’s guess how much of any medication is in your body when you take it, six hours later, or on the 7th and 8th day (after you stopped taking the antibiotic).
It’s very difficult to extrapolate from an individual to a population or from a population to an individual.
Yes. That’s kind of my point (if I have one). The dosage and the timing are just general recommendations, no need to go crazy taking them on a strict time table. I’m pretty sure they’ve figured out what a harmful overdose would be and based the timing on avoiding that, but otherwise I’m confident that there’s no way of knowing if taking them every 10 hours instead of every 12 has a downside to it. I just don’t know if that has an upside, or no side at all. I am eager to be done with this damned respiratory issue, that’s for damned sure.
The thing to remember, though is this: with alcohol, many/most of us know if we have a higher or lower tolerance than our friends. It’s, therefore, relatively simple to adjust your consumption accordingly.
Not so for most of us with medications.
So, while there can be a big margin of error, you may be pushing things in the ‘wrong direction.’
Sometimes, that’s totally benign; other times, not so much.
And you don’t know.
Whereas, you would know with alcohol.
The average is just that: the average. But when you consciously deviate from it, you are probably rolling the dice a bit more … with very little upside.
