In our ENT specialty, the most common disease is chronic tonsillitis, the main symptom of which is sore throat, fever in childhood, and admittedly mainly pain.
There is a widely spread common knowledge among the people that “tonsils are the first line of defense of human immunity and must not be removed, otherwise there will be no portal to get sick more easily”.
The tonsils are our birth immune organ, and play an immune function from birth until the age of 8. However, as the lymph nodes throughout the body develop and become more functional, the immune function of the tonsils is gradually replaced and withdrawn from the defense arena, degenerating and atrophying to 1 degree or even a small residue in some people.
Unlike the appendix and thymus, the tonsils may still have some function, but for patients who already have chronic tonsillitis, they are far more harmful than the immune function they may have left behind, and do more harm than good.
We ask patients to remove their tonsils on the basis that they are already a health hazard. Patients with chronic tonsillitis have fever and sore throat, if only because they have these symptoms, we can not cut them off, we can treat these symptoms in internal medicine.
But this is not the case. Chronic tonsillitis has many complications caused by it, such as intractable eczema, acute nephritis, rheumatism, psoriasis, and other immune system diseases.
Because the tonsils are an immune organ, they will accumulate antibodies to external stimuli in the body, and when new antigens come again, they will produce an immune response in the body organs where the antibodies are deposited, and then our body will have a disease, which seems to be not related to the tonsils at all, and the location is not adjacent, but in fact the relationship is very big, they can be a whole in the body.
That’s why doctors from the dermatology and rheumatology departments of nephrology and immunology contact us most often now, and ask patients to come to see if there is inflammation of the tonsils and whether they need to be removed.
In addition, once the body organs are involved, they cannot recover, and at this time, if you choose to remove the tonsils, you will only be able to control the frequency and degree of organ disease, and it will be very difficult to cure them completely.
So when we diagnose a patient with chronic tonsillitis in the clinic, and when we advise the patient with all our heart that he should have his tonsils removed, don’t use that old folk knowledge to put us off, listen to our advice and return a healthy body to you!