The symptoms of sinusitis are always repeatedly tormenting them, but many people do not pay enough attention to it, or take medication for three days or simply do not go to treatment. In fact, suffering from sinusitis not only requires timely medical attention, but in many cases may also require surgical treatment.
If the sinusitis is mild and has not been there for a long time, medication should be preferred, and if it does not work after three months, surgery may have to be considered. So how can you tell when medication is not working for sinusitis? Sinus CT is the gold standard. Doctors generally use CT to determine whether a patient needs surgery. In addition, it is important to consider the symptoms together to see if the patient’s symptoms such as nasal congestion and headache are relieved by taking medication, and if not, surgery is needed if the sinus CT lesion is not lifted. In general, severe sinusitis or nasal polyps often respond poorly even to medication or should be treated with nasal endoscopic surgery as soon as possible.
There are some things to consider when doing sinus surgery. Before surgery, it is best for the patient not to take anticoagulant drugs and to stop taking them a week before surgery, otherwise it is easy to cause excessive bleeding during surgery. Also, don’t eat spicy food, pay attention to your life and try not to catch a cold. If you catch a cold, you are likely to suffer from acute sinusitis and aggravate the inflammation. In addition, ideally, patients with nasal polyps can use hormone-containing nasal sprays for a month before surgery and start taking oral hormone-based medications about a week before surgery to reduce the amount of bleeding during surgery. And after the surgery, both phases require extra care. The first is during the hospitalization period, when the postoperative hemostatic sponge needs to be filled, generally speaking for 3 days, 2 days for patients with little bleeding, and up to 4 days for those with a lot of bleeding. After 10 days after surgery, a nasal spray should be used continuously for 2 months to reduce recurrence and promote normalization of the mucosa. Patients with heavy sinusitis should take macrolides to prevent recurrence, which are generally recommended in small doses for at least 2 months. Also, nasal rinsing should be attended to in order to flush out old blood and secretions to aid recovery. Usually, physiological seawater will be chosen for nasal rinsing, which is started one week after the surgery and is recommended to be adhered to for 1-2 weeks.
After discharge from the hospital, it is critical to adhere to the review of medication changes. Post-operative medication changes are usually required once a week for the first month, once every half month for the second month, once a month for the third month, and then once every 3 months and half a year. This is difficult for most patients to do, and even more so for foreign patients, but it should still be followed as much as possible. If you can’t find a surgeon to review your surgery, you can find a local rhinologist nearby to review your surgery, so that you can find recurrent lesions in time to avoid re-admission to the hospital.