Major Review of 120+ Trials Questions Long-Held Advice to Always Finish Antibiotics

For generations, the instruction to finish every antibiotic prescription has carried the weight of medical certainty — a rule so repeated it became reflex. Now, a sweeping analysis of more than 120 clinical trials is quietly unsettling that certainty, finding that shorter treatment courses often work just as well as the full ones patients have long been told are non-negotiable. The irony runs deep: the very advice meant to prevent antibiotic resistance may have been quietly feeding it, by prolonging exposure beyond what the evidence actually required.