The guidelines to adhere to adequate treatment is to provide pharmaceutical drugs that will help eliminate tuberculosis and follow-up check-ups to ensure that tuberculosis is not a deterring factor in a patients life. There are many cultural barriers as many patients might continue to work under unsanitary living conditions or not have enough money to pay for the treatments. Programs that provide stipends and incentives to allow citizens to seek treatment are also necessary. The fourth element to the DOTS approach is to have a management program that supplies a sustainable long-term supply of reliable antibiotics. Lastly, the fifth component is to record and monitor treatment plans to ensure that the DOTS approach is effective. The DOTS approach not only aims to provide structure for tuberculosis programs, but also to ensure that citizens diagnosed with tuberculosis adhere to protocols which will prevent future bacterial infections.These include government commitment to control TB, diagnosis based on sputum-smear microscopy tests done on patients who actively report TB symptoms, direct observation short-course chemotherapy treatments, a definite supply of drugs, and standardized reporting and recording of cases and treatment outcomes. The WHO advises that all TB patients should have at least the first two months of their therapy observed (and preferably the whole of it observed): this means an independent observer watching patients swallow their anti-TB therapy. The independent observer is often not a healthcare worker and may be a shopkeeper or a tribal elder or similar senior person within that society.
Second line
The second line drugs (WHO groups 2, 3 and 4) are only used to treat disease that is resistant to first line therapy (i.e., for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) or multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB)). A drug may be classed as second-line instead of first-line for one of three possible reasons: it may be less effective than the first-line drugs (e.g., p-aminosalicylic acid); or, it may have toxic side-effects (e.g., cycloserine); or it may be effective, but unavailable in many developing countries (e.g., fluoroquinolones):
aminoglycosides (WHO group 2): e.g., amikacin (AMK), kanamycin (KM);
polypeptides (WHO group 2): e.g., capreomycin, viomycin, enviomycin;
fluoroquinolones (WHO group 3): e.g., ciprofloxacin (CIP), levofloxacin, moxifloxacin (MXF);
thioamides (WHO group 4): e.g. ethionamide, prothionamide
cycloserine (WHO group 4)
terizidone (WHO group 5)

Third line
Third-line drugs (WHO group 5) include drugs that may be useful, but have doubtful or unproven efficacy:
rifabutin
macrolides: e.g., clarithromycin (CLR);
linezolid (LZD);
thioacetazone (T);
thioridazine;
arginine;
vitamin D;
bedaquiline.These drugs are listed here either because they are not very effective (e.g., clarithromycin) or because their efficacy has not been proven (e.g., linezolid, R207910). Rifabutin is effective, but is not included on the WHO list because for most developing countries, it is impractically expensive. Standard regimen
Rationale and evidence
Tuberculosis has been treated with combination therapy for over fifty years. Drugs are not used singly (except in latent TB or chemoprophylaxis), and regimens that use only single drugs result in the rapid development of resistance and treatment failure. The rationale for using multiple drugs to treat TB are based on simple probability.