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What is Tuberculosis ?
How is Tuberculosis Treated ? |
If you have active TB, your doctor may ask you to stay in hospital for the first 2-4 weeks of your drug treatment, just to make sure you are not able to spread TB to anyone else. After this time, your life will pretty much return to normal, except that you will have to continue taking TB pills each day for 6-9 months.
TB medicine is free in Canada.
It is extremely important that you do not miss taking any pills, and you cannot stop taking them until your doctor has said so. People being treated for tuberculosis with drugs do not spread the disease to others, but if you were to stop taking your drugs too early, you would become much sicker and you would endanger people around you. When drugs are not used properly, drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria can be formed.
Before drugs were available to treat tuberculosis, people with this disease had to go away for months or years to "sanatoria". The sanatoria (or "sanatorium", for just one) were big buildings, like hospitals, where all you could do is rest all day in bed, so your body could heal itself. But after pills became available to treat TB in the 1950s, people no longer went to the sanatorium, and pretty soon the sanatoria all closed down.
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