• Question: what is the difference between taking an antibiotic tablet to an antibiotic injection?

    Asked by Heather to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 10 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Danna Gifford

      Danna Gifford answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      Antibiotic tablets are much more commonly given than injections, mainly because it’s easier to swallow a pill than to inject with a needle. A person with an infection can be given a prescription for tablets that they can take at home. Usually only people who are very ill and in hospital with a very bad infection are given injections.

    • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

      Jonathan Hunter answered on 10 Jun 2016:

      There are also some antibiotics which can only be given by injection.
      A tablet has to go through your stomach (acidic) and your intestine (basic) before it can enter your blood system. These are very harsh environments and can stop some antibiotics working. So they have to be injected.
      There are some newer systems which are different from either a tablet or an injection. You can get patches that allow drugs to go through your skin (nicotine patches) and others which get into your blood system via your tongue.

    • Photo: Lindsay Robinson

      Lindsay Robinson answered on 11 Jun 2016:

      It’s all about the way drugs are delivered to your body. Mostly we take antibiotics as tablets or liquid but sometimes, usually for more specialist antibiotics, these have to be given using a drip or injection in hospital.

    • Photo: Juan Ortiz

      Juan Ortiz answered on 12 Jun 2016:

      I would say that the key difference is that injected antibiotics go straight to your blood stream whereas, tablets have to go through your digestive tube (stomach and intestine) where, as Jonathan has said, they have to resist the digestion before getting into your blood. That’s why antibiotics are injected when someone is very ill (like Danna mentioned), so a higher dose of antibiotic can get into the blood and kill the bacteria which are causing the infection more quickly

    • Photo: Daniela Lobo

      Daniela Lobo answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      As the others said, it’s all to do with drug formulation. Sometimes you can take penicillin through a pill and other times you have to take it as an injection in your buttocks (for example, when you have tonsillitis)!

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