Not a Trivial Procedure

The authors retrospectively studied adults who underwent tonsillectomies after recurrent tonsillitis. They used quality of life scores and measured number of days off work because of illness and the number of visits to doctors. It is surprising that they did not include the not insubstantial rate of perioperative and postoperative complications in the results of their study and the discussion section. The number of postoperative hemorrhages is 1.4% (1) to 3.3% (2). The fact that a simple PubMed search using the search terms “tonsillectomy” and “perioperative or postoperative complications” shows up 24 meta-analyses. To me, this confirms that the procedure is not trivial. Two years ago, Deutsches Arzteblatt published a CME article on the topic of tonsillectomy in children (3). The authors postulated rightly that the indication for this intervention should be very narrowly defined. The article by Senska et al is mostly of no value in this respect because it is subject to bias, especially in terms of the included patients: someone who has decided to have a tonsillectomy is bound to be convinced by this procedure and will give positive scores in order not to have to have to live with the feeling that they have risked health and life unnecessarily.