Life is on the line and only one dose of antibiotic is available.

This is NOT a personal medical question, this is fully hypothetical.

Assume for the hypothetical society has crumbled and its Mad Max type conditions, no medical care is available or has any hope of being available. You have one or two dose units of oral antibiotic and a cut that is clearly infected and not looking good. Would the limited amount of antibiotics provide any benefit in fighting off the infection and allowing you to survive? Or be essentially useless?

I know the argument against indiscriminate or incomplete antibiotic therapy, it doesn’t apply in my hypothetical obviously.

Useless - the initial dose will knock out some of the weaker bacteria, but the remainder will survive and come back once the antibiotic tails off. As I recall, this happened to the first patient treated with penicillin - he responded well, but they ran out. They were collecting his urine to recycle the excreted penicillin in an attempt to keep treating him, but the patient died.

I doubt it would be effective. I can’t really answer your question for sure (IANAD or Pharmacist), but I would be surprised if only one or two doses would be enough to effectively treat any type of infection. IIRC, short courses of antibiotics can be used for some infections, but even then a short course is usually 3 days as opposed to a week or more. Also, if you only have one or two doses on hand, they’re probably pills that are in a dosage that’s designed to be effective when taken in multiple small doses for an entire course.

Bacteria are more susceptible or less susceptible to different types of antibiotics, but if it’s a desperate situation where you only have one type of antibiotic on hand, if you’re lucky then it will be an antibiotic that’s more effective against the particular infection you have. Or you might not be so lucky. Generally with antibiotic treatment for a serious infection, they’ll start you on a broad spectrum antibiotic while they’re waiting for culture results to determine what antibiotics your infection is susceptible to, and then they’ll change to a drug that better targets your specific infection.

Also, you say it’s “clearly infected”, but if it’s only just started and has some mild inflammation then the infection might be less established and easier to treat.

This is just anecdotal, but my daughter got an infected cut last week that we ended getting anti-biotics for. After two doses (the next day) it was already looking much better. Maybe it would come back stronger if we didn’t finish off the anti-biotics, but even just two doses did seem to help.

That’s the whole problem. People take the antibiotics for two days, feel (or look) better and stop taking them. What’s left is something that’s resistant to the antibiotics they were taking and when if flares up again they need to move to more powerful drugs. Eventually, we may not have anything more powerful. This is why people need to take antibiotics for the full course, even if you feel better.

I would not take them, and would counsel someone else likewise. As has already been said, you’ll end up only killing the weakest of the bacteria. Now you’ve given the strongest bacteria more real estate and resources to grow and divide. You run the real risk of making the infection worse and harder on your body to treat, not better.

If I didn’t have a full course of antibiotics, I’d go pick some goldenseal and garlic and make a poultice.

IANAD nor do I have any type of medical training. (Other than basic Red Cross first aid training, as a Divemaster. :wink: ) And plenty of ‘common sense’.

I realize that this doesn’t necessarily answer the OP’s question, but
Speaking from personal experience only. I’ve never been one to run to a doctor or the ER for minor stuff. Even cuts that probably should have had a couple of stitches (at the very least). Clean 'em and tape ‘em up!
And I’m still alive and kickin’! :smiley:

And my personal opinion is…
Today’s society, is too quick to ‘take a pill’ for every little sniffle and pain. :eek:

Well, IANAD, but it does seem to me that giving ones body a leg up while the immune system manufactures some custom immunoglobulins could be very beneficial. After all, in an opportunistic infection like this one, you are likely to be fighting a lot of different bugs, and any one antibiotic would only kill some of them, even if you had a full course available. It’s all about finding the tipping point, and in this micro scenario, I’d take the antibiotics.

Yes, in our current context you would only be lowering your chance of the particular antibiotic working on your current infection. But that argument in itself implies that in the best scenario taking the antibiotic does not kill all the bacteria, only the non-resistant ones. The body still has to take care of the resistant bacteria, but is freed up to do so by the mass death of the vulnerable ones.

I also don’t think that the resistant germs are necessarily “Stronger” in terms of our bodies’ abilty to fight them, they just happen to be less likely to die in the presence of the antibiotic. So in the context of the immune system, you haven’t manufactured a “super bug” you’ve only narrowed the number of different immunoglobulin configurations necessary to fight the infection.

So you’d be vastly reducing the population of bacteria, plus narrowing down the types the immune system needs to focus on. I say take the doses, close together, and cauterize the wound from the outside.

I am guessing that you haven’t had any badly infected cuts. Lucky you.

Not every cut gets infected, but when one does, it can rapidly become fatal. This is especially true if you have a medical condition that predisposes you to infection (such as the quite common diabetes), inhabit an area where the water carries infectious agents, or live in a tropical climate.

It’s not hard to lose a limb, or more, by ignoring an infected cut or scrape. It’s worth learning to recognize the symptoms (fever, heat emanating from the wound, redness, swelling, discharge, malaise) so that you can get medical care as soon as possible. Again, wound infections are potentially fatal, even in normally healthy people.

Yea I’m in Trinidad, any real deep puncture wound is pretty much mandatory IV NOT oral antibiotics or you very likely risk death. Oral antibiotics are a joke really, if you don’t get to the hospital and get on an IV quickly you’re probably gonna be feeling feverish and see red streaks running away from the wound in hours.

You’d be a fool to leave even a light wound unsterilized and dressed, two words carnivorous maggots. You know that thing about maggots only eat dead tissue? Not here, there is a species of fly that lays eggs on any open wound and they will spread and eat you or any mammal from the inside.

This is the only reference I can find ONLINE, although the picture of the maggots and the description of infection don’t match with what I’ve seen in a dog and been told by a vet(she did not know the name but knew what I meant, said she has seen dogs half eaten from the inside out). A dog or person gets a cut, the eggs get laid on it if uncovered and then LARGE long white active worms move through the animal.

ANNNYWAAAAY yea I’m the last person that would fuck around with antibiotics at home, it does however inspire bizarre hypotheticals.

I sounds to me like mere contact with the eggs of those flies is all it takes. There is no necessisity for an open wound; it clearly says that they ride in on the belly of a tick and then burrow into the skin of the host. :eek:

What, bedtime already? Sleep well then! :wink:

If you only have two pills, I think they would be better than nothing. You’re on your own next time anyway.

This entire post gets a :eek: from me. I will never, ever tell this to my wife, who wants to send me to the emergency room whenever I nick myself while cooking.

Plus, I have diabetes. I know from experience that said wounds take longer to heal, and can get infected, but “rapidly become fatal?” And “it’s not hard to lose a limb, or more, by ignoring an infected cut or scrape?”

That sounds a little alarmist without specifying local ecology, no?

I think sven is saying that if you see signs of becoming infected, then seek medical care. Not that you need to seek medical care every time you nick yourself cooking.

When I cleverly cut my finger open a few weeks back chopping a pepper, it was Neosporin and a band-aid. I’ve never had one get infected, but if I did, you bet I’d be seeking some sort of treatment.

The local ecology needn’t be anything more exotic than the bacteria that normally eke out a bare existence on your own skin. Two and a bit years ago I’d been under some exam stress so I thought the man-flu symptoms were down to that and I hadn’t a clue what the funny red rash on my skin was. However, when it seemed to be getting worse I said I’d go into surgery first thing Monday. Mrs M. asked on Sunday afternoon if she should ring an out-of-hours surgery and I first said no, then purely on impulse changed my mind.

An hour or so later, I’ve passed out in the waiting room, I come round to be told there’s an ambulance on the way, I’m being cannulised and given a shot of broad-spectrum antibiotic until the hospital lab can test my blood, and I’m on the ward for four days with a lower left leg the size of an airship. The only bearable way for me to pee for the next few days was standing on the good leg and elevating the other above hip height. I could walk as long as I went from lying down to briskly walking as quickly as possible. After four days they agreed the Clarithromycin was working (penicillin is worse than useless to me) and sent me home with another ten days’ supply - and you may believe I finished every one of those horse-pills down to the last grain of powder.

Just under a year later and I graze myself quad-biking in France. I clean the place and give it plenty of antiseptic, but should probably have stayed out of the water for the rest of the holiday. Wednesday of the first week back and I wake up feeling slightly feverish in the morning, and that plus the angry-looking region around the graze is more than enough to get me to surgery a.s.a.p. So this time I get to have a car ride to the E.R. and only two days as an in-patient. In 2010 I’d never heard of cellulitis and I let it get to the septicaemic stage. 2011, I saw it coming - and it still wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

Diabetes is a known risk factor, btw.