Antibiotics Are Useless In Treating Most Sinus Infections

An anonymous reader writes "While doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics to treat sinus infections, researchers on Tuesday revealed that amoxicillin, the most commonly prescribed medication for nasal cavity inflammation and sinuses, was just as effective as a dummy pill. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, found that there was no significant difference in symptoms between patients taking amoxicillin to those who took the placebo three days after starting the pills were administered."

Comments

Re:Here's a link to the actual study at JAMA's sit

[stillnotelf]

Here are some interesting points from the paper:

A) Someone's got a sense of humor: "The primary outcome was measured using the modified Sinonasal Outcome Test-16 (SNOT-16), a validated and responsive measure."

B) They did no testing whatsoever to ensure the sinus infections _were_ bacterial - but they apparently usually are, and are usually diagnosed as such symptomatically instead of by culture (in other words, they followed normal practices in deciding who to give antibiotics to).

C) They did no testing to see if resistant bacteria could be isolated from any patients.

Putting B and C together...clearly the medical community is overprescribing antibiotics, but there may be some question of whether it's resistant bacterial infections or poor diagnosis of bacterial vs. viral infections.