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Throat Cultures May Be Useless

To treat a sore throat, physicians first take a throat culture to see what kind of bacteria is causing it. That may be useless, this article suggests, even though one in seven Americans undergoes a throat culture each year. The article lists four reasons why throat cultures may be useless: (1) Some sick people don't show signs of infection. (2) Some infected people don't show signs of being sick. (3) Even when bacteria have been properly identified, antibiotic treatments often fail. And (4) bacteria isolated from the surface of the throat "are a poor representation of organisms lying deep in the tissues." "There is little indication from the literature," the author concludes, "that any routine system of identifying bacterial causes of sore throat is helpful to the clinician." - C. Del Mar, "Managing sore throat: A literature review," Medicaljournal of Australia 156 (1992): 572-75.

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