Doesn’t rat poison work along the lines like you have to take a stabilizing dose of vitamin K and then you have to take it daily over the course of a month to make sure you’ll be OK?
Not really. Warfarin (aka rat poison, coumadin, “blood thinner”) is reversed by vitamin K, but a person on chronic warfarin shouldn’t need regular vitamin K unless they get too much of the warfarin. And the warfarin needs to be given daily, to be continuously effective in thinning the blood.
But usually if a patient stops taking warfarin, their blood coagulability returns to normal in less than a week.
Nowadays they have superwarfarins that can stick around for months.
If you just need an analagous literary device, perhaps the perp could implant into the victim a poison (cyanide, say) contained within a triggering device that requires a computer code transmitted to it every day to keep from releasing the poison. Without the code, the cyanide is released.
The victim thus needs to get the “antidote” (the chip code) to triggering release of the toxin every day.
See I think the bad guy should tell the good guy he’s giving him the antidote daily but it’s really something addictive so if he tries to quit he goes through withdrawal that he thinks is the original poison kicking in.
Or something like that.
What about tuberculosis? The treatment for TB usually involves a strict antibiotic regimen taken regularly for 6 to 24 months, and failure to adhere to the regimen typically induces recurrence of a potentially lethal infection.
Most cases of TB which get treated (in the US anyway) are “latent TB infections” which frankly are unlikely to ever turn into a health-threatening or contagious case, unless underlying factors like HIV or other illnesses complicate the matter. 9 months of antibiotic is given to eliminate the ‘sleeping’ TB organism from the system, to reduce further the small chance of the bacteria ‘waking up’ and causing active disease.
Active TB disease requires multiple drugs for longer times, but even then, failing to treat it isn’t a sure death sentence.
What about an antidote mixed with a poison
Each antidote sets you up for the next poison and so on.
the blackmailer could change the poison for each dose
to make it difficult for the victim to build up a any resistance:(
For example?