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Review
. 2007 Jan;22(1):127-30.
doi: 10.1007/s11606-006-0020-4.

Pharyngitis management: defining the controversy

Robert Maccabee Centor  1 , Jeroan Julius Allison, Stuart James Cohen
Affiliations
Review

Pharyngitis management: defining the controversy

Robert Maccabee Centor et al. J Gen Intern Med. 2007 Jan.

Abstract

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.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Characteristics of 1,000 hypothetical patients with sore throat.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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