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Comment by awqrre | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed that it was to completely kill it and that resistance was a side effect of not killing it...

Yep, you're intelligent enough to make the correct assumption. Unfortunately, I presume many others are not and could really use a little extra education by the pharmacist dispensing meds -- so they also understand the why.

Meanwhile, here's me over here, thinking throughout my youth that it was advice to prevent the painful, avoidable side effects withdrawal symptoms.

Stepping down off a high dosage in halves is the exact same strategy used to ease people out of addiction.

As a kid, I thought anti-biotics were this far-out medicine, so strong and hazardous that coming down off them was something you had to do carefully.

A reasonable hypothesis for a kid. Though, if you ever take any antibiotics, they usually don't taper off the dose at the end, do they?

Not the ones that I've encountered... they used the same dose at the same intervals for the whole period of time... maybe to keep a lethal level in your system the whole time.

Yes, exactly. And a smart kid might notice that. :)

I definitely remember receiving blister packs, decorated with directions and pill groupings that started with 2 pills, at high intervals like every 6 hours, then tapered to 2 pills every 12 hours toward the end of the first week, then 1 pill every 12 hours for the remainder of the pack, and included strict instructions to use the whole thing.

I got strep throat a few times as a kid. I don't have perfect recall about the details of what I had to take and when or why, though. But I do remember having to vary dosage.

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