OTC remedies are increasingly used to treat sore throats during angina or pharyngitis, as an alternative to antibiotics. Well-done study reveals ineffectiveness of probiotics and xylitol chewing gum.
Resistance to antibiotics is one of the major challenges in medicine today. To do this, alternatives are sometimes recommended by medical teams and acclaimed by patients. This is the case with probiotics and xylitol chewing gum in tonsillitis, a common condition that is most often secondary to infection with a virus.
Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have published a controlled study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal having tested one of these treatments against placebo. The results show the complete ineffectiveness of these two remedies in the treatment of angina pain.
No medical reason to recommend these OTC remedies
Xylitol is an extract of birch bark, as for probiotics, these are bacteria which are normally present in a physiological state in the throat and which act positively on the organism.
Nine hundred and thirty-four people were drawn into one of the 3 study groups: no chewing gum, xylitol chewing gum, or sorbitol chewing gum. Each group also received either one probiotic or nothing. Six hundred and eighty-nine patients noted the number of probiotic capsules used, or chewing xylitol chewing gum.
The researchers showed that these two OTC remedies had no effect on the symptoms. They only found a statistically insignificant decrease in sore throat recurrence with xylitol. “There is no reason for doctors to recommend that patients use this kind of treatment to treat pain from angina or pharyngitis,” explain the authors of the study.
This is one of the few large controlled studies conducted on the effectiveness of OTC alternatives to antibiotics in angina. This deserves to be underlined.
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