Doctors are considering antibiotics as a replacement for appendectomy.
Based on the recent findings, antibiotics can replace appendectomy, doctors claim after publishing a new study in the journal JAMA. These drugs have proven themselves particularly effective in halting the progression of appendicitis and, thus, prevent patients from resorting to appendectomy.
People fear all surgical interventions, even the small and relatively simple appendectomy. This medical practice was first performed 100 years ago and has remained the same ever since.
Obviously, significant improvements have been brought to the surgical intervention as doctors have constantly perfected their techniques. The new technological means have also helped scientists find new methods to remove the infected appendicitis without causing much pain to the patient.
Even so, researchers are always open to new possibilities. As a consequence, they have recently conducted a new experiment aimed to show whether antibiotics can prevent appendicitis and, hence replace appendectomy.
They have inspired themselves from the medical description of the antibiotics and set out to test its effectiveness on appendicitis infections. Antibiotics are the main drugs that physicians recommend, whenever confronted with an infection outburst.
This same principle is valid for appendicitis, as well, which is described in medical terms as an infection. For that matter, researchers have gathered a large group of patients to determine whether antibiotics can cure appendicitis in the same way it does with other diseases.
Doctors have asked 256 respondents to take part in the experiment. They have received antibiotic-based treatment for one year and they were closely monitored all throughout this period. At the end of the study, 186 participants no longer required appendectomy, as a result of the antibiotics that they were administered.
In spite of the good results that the scientific experiment has registered, medical experts remain cautious in regard to the actual benefits of the medicine. They have stated that 70 of the patients still required appendectomy when the experiment was over.
Before setting out to conduct the experiment, researchers set a failure rate of 24% as the maximum level of mistakes that the study can have. Results have shown, on the other hand, that the real failure rate was 27.3%; therefore, experts have concluded that antibiotics cannot replace appendectomy.
At most, antibiotics can be used as a complementary treatment for the amelioration of appendicitis, but there are cases when a surgical intervention is absolutely necessary. The fact that no patient suffered intra-abdominal abscesses or complications indicates that antibiotics may be used to safely delay appendectomy.
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