Antibiotics, Docs’ Silver Bullet for Sinusitis, Are Useless: JAMA Study Documents

Sinusitis is not alleviated by antibiotics. All those claims of evidence-based medicine are yet again shown to be what they are: Bunkum. Claptrap. Lies. Farce.

After decades of prescribing antibiotics for sinusitis, a serious study has finally been done to see if it actually works. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “Amoxicillin for Acute Rhinosinusitis” (doi:10.1001/jama.2012.138) found no sinusitis improvement from the use of antibiotics. The authors reported:

To our knowledge, this is the first trial of antibiotic treatment for acute rhinosinusitis to assess improvement in disease-specific quality of life as the primary outcome, an outcome that is important to patients.

The study was randomized and placebo-controlled. They used the Sinonasal Outcome Test-16, appropriately called SNOT, to measure outcomes. No benefit was found.

Though the authors say that there was no increase in adverse effects, the reality is that all use of antibiotics permanently damages the gut biota and increases the risk of cancer. Therefore, real harm has been done to everyone who has been given this useless treatment.

How many people have been given useless and harmful antibiotics for sinusitis? Millions!  The BBC estimates that 1 – 5% of adults in the UK are diagnosed with it every year—and 90% of them are prescribed antibiotics! That’s an enormous amount of harm. How many have gone on to suffer cancer as a result? We don’t know how much ill health has resulted from the damage done to gut bacteria.

MedPageToday reports that Lee Green, MD, MPH, from the University of MIchigan, states that it’s:

… no surprise that [amoxicillin] doesn’t help. Sinusitis is almost always viral anyway. If anything, it’s less effective. The prevalence of its prescribing represents sloppy practice. It’s a fad.

A very long term fad that’s done untold harm.

Where’s the Evidence?

Sinusitis can be a miserable condition. That seems to be the excuse used to justify the unjustifiable overuse of antibiotics for the condition. The fact that they’ve never been shown to be effective—that there has never been any evidence for it—hasn’t stopped most doctors from pushing them … and ultimately blaming the patients for wanting them. But who created that demand? It wasn’t the patients’ invention that antibiotics would cure sinusitis. It was the Medical Monopoly Mafia that pushed the lie.

When no studies have been done demonstrating that a treatment is effective, the claim that modern medical practice is evidence based gets slung around. When finally, years—in this case decades—later a legitimate study demonstrates that the treatment doesn’t work, the term evidence based medicine is quietly dropped. But only in conjunction with that particular treatment. It continues to be used, and generally with the same degree of fraudulence, in all other medical treatments.

Tagged antibiotics, antibiotics sinusitis, antibiotics useless, big pharma, conventional medicine, evidence-based medicine, jama, journal of the american medical association, modern medicine, pharmaceutical drugs, pharmaceuticals, science