Gonorrhea is treated with antibiotics, usually given in the form of a pill or injection. In recent years, some strains of the gonorrhea bacteria have become resistant to certain antibiotics. A culture of the gonorrhea infection may indicate if it is a drug-resistant strain. Because of the increase in resistant strains, physicians may treat all gonorrhea cases as if they were drug-resistant strains and use nonresistant antibiotics.

Most antibiotics can be administered in a single dose or as a week’s worth of pills. The patient should refrain from sexual activity for seven days (for either form of medication) to give the medication time to work. Patients should also wait before resuming sexual activity with their previous sexual partners until their partners have been both tested and seven days after being treated for gonorrhea. Patients should have a follow-up physician visit after a week of medication to recheck symptoms and possibly repeat cultures and verify that the gonorrhea infection has been cured. They should be certain to complete any oral medication or the infection may not be completely eradicated. Patients treated for gonorrhea can be reinfected with the disease if they have sexual contact with another infected person.

Pregnant women with gonorrhea have additional treatment considerations. They cannot take certain antibiotics because the drugs may affect fetal development. For example, tetracycline antibiotics may discolor the developing baby’s teeth. Gonorrhea also makes women more likely to have a miscarriage or a premature birth. In addition to treatment with antibiotics, pregnant women may be treated with other drugs to avoid preterm labor.

People infected with gonorrhea are frequently infected with chlamydia, another sexually transmitted disease with few symptoms. When gonorrhea is diagnosed, physicians may prescribe a combination of antibiotics in order to treat the patient for chlamydia as well. This is because the antibiotics used to treat chlamydia are usually less expensive than the test used to diagnose it.