A proposed strategy for combatting the spread of antibiotic resistance is to allow doctors to prescribe only a certain subset of antibiotic drugs and regularly rotate which antibiotics are allowed to be prescribed over several years. Why could this approach limit the spread of antibiotic resistance?
Using different antibiotics at different times will prevent your body from developing too strong a resistance to any one drug.
During times when a specific antibiotic is NOT being used, those bacteria with resistance will not have higher fitness and are more likely to be removed from the population.
Removing the use of certain antibiotics lessens the chance that bacterial genomes will mutate in ways that provide resistance to that specific antibiotic.
This approach would allow bacteria to evolve resistance to less powerful and, therefore, less important drugs while keeping resistance low to more powerful and important antibiotics.