UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Quantitative Health SciencesDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2007-03-14Keywords
Anti-Bacterial AgentsAntigens, Bacterial
Drug Resistance, Bacterial
Humans
Pharyngitis
Practice Guidelines as Topic
Reagent Kits, Diagnostic
Severity of Illness Index
Bioinformatics
Biostatistics
Epidemiology
Health Services Research
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Despite numerous controlled trials, clinical practice guidelines and cost-effective analyses, controversy persists regarding the appropriate management strategy for adult pharyngitis. In this perspective, we explore this controversy by comparing two competing clinical guidelines. Although the guidelines appear to make widely diverging recommendations, we show that the controversy centers on only a small proportion of patients: those presenting with severe pharyngitis. We examine recently published data to illustrate that this seemingly simple problem of strep throat remains a philosophical issue: should we give primacy to relieving acute time-limited symptoms, or should we emphasize the potential societal risk of antibiotic resistance? We accept potentially over treating a minority of adult pharyngitis patients with the most severe presentations to reduce suffering in an approximately equal number of patients who will have false negative test results if the test-and-treat strategy were used.Source
J Gen Intern Med. 2007 Jan;22(1):127-30. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1007/s11606-006-0020-4Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/47689PubMed ID
17351852Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1007/s11606-006-0020-4