WASHINGTON — If you’re suffering from spring allergies, you may also be getting hit with pain, congestion and even fever from sinusitis. And that usually means antibiotics.
But The Wall Street Journal reports that there may be a better way — doing nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing exactly. But “watchful waiting” works out just about as well as antibiotics, says the American Academy of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery Foundation.
Dr. Richard Rosenfeld, chairman of otolaryngology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, tells The Wall Street Journal that “Even if you’re really sick and have a high fever, it’s still OK to initially observe without antibiotics because all the data from more than a dozen trials don’t really show that there’s any greater benefit.”
The academy’s guidelines say that people with sinusitis that last 10 days or more should wait another seven days, and only start antibiotics if symptoms stay the same or get worse.
The Journal says that sinusitis usually starts as a viral infection, which antibiotics don’t help, and only turn into a bacterial infection 2 percent of the time. But doctors prescribe antibiotics to sinusitis patients 90 percent of the time — one in five times that an adult is prescribed antibiotics, it’s for sinusitis, studies show.
That leads to a lot of unnecessary antibiotic use, and that in turn leads to the development of bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics.
“Sinusitis is one of the top reasons for antibiotics,” said Dr. Daniel Merenstein, of the Georgetown University Medical Center, who helped review the new guidelines before publication. “If people would follow this it would be great because it would really decrease antibiotic resistance, which is such a big problem in the United States.”
The guidelines recommend regular pain relievers such as acetaminophen and ibuprofen, and saline irrigation, such as with a neti pot. And if you smoke, stop!
