Sinus Infections

But, yeah, I mean, you said it, right? Like it fits the bill for an acute rhinosinusitis.

There we go.

That's what I'm looking for.

And when I say acute, it's less than four weeks.

And this was like what, like

five days? Five

days.

Yeah, so if they have symptoms, which is – And the reason why it's important to know that time frame is it differentiates acute from chronic.

So chronic is if you have more than 12 weeks of these kinds of symptoms, whereas it's less than four weeks, it fits more to that acute picture.

But the presence of facial pain and pressure that is especially worse when maybe palpated or whenever leaning forward really suggests a sinusitis.

And then on top of that, if they have nasal obstructive symptoms, in other words, congestion is a very common one.

That's a good enough for the diagnosis or they have nasal discharge

or you can have all of them.

So

if you have this person does.

Yeah.

So that kind of like purulent nasal discharge or mucopurulent nasal discharge and or a, you know, Nasal obstructive symptoms like congestion in combination with that facial pain and pressure that's worse when palpated or worse when leaning forward.

That really, in a less than a four-week time frame, fits the diagnosis for acute rhinosinusitis.

The next thing that you have to then ask yourself is, is it viral or bacterial? The reason why that's important is it tells you if you're going to treat them or not treat them.

And so what I mean by that is, Oftentimes when these patients come in and you make a diagnosis of acute rhinosinusitis, you then often then ask yourself the question, okay, what I would want to do is I'd want to consider is it viral or is it bacterial? Well, it's kind of hard to pick between those two.

They both can look the same.

So what you do is you look at...

Are they generally getting better if you give them some time to observe them? Are they getting better or improving within a certain time frame? So if their symptoms do get better within less than 10 days of like their initial presentation, then you can say, that's probably viral and we're good.

We don't need to do anything about that.

It usually gets better on its own and there's nothing that you need to do about that.