Appendicitis – Treatment

Transcript

So you had the symptoms, you went in, you got tested and now you’ve been diagnosed with acute appendicitis. So what are the treatment options? Oftentimes the first step is you’ll be given antibiotics. Remember at its core, appendicitis is an infection. So the antibiotics will help to start killing off some of the bacteria and just cooling off the process globally. It’s really critical to realize, however, that using antibiotics is not a definitive treatment for acute appendicitis. The best way to treat appendicitis in fact, the only way essentially is to actually go in and surgically remove the infected appendix. Or there are two general approaches to surgery that we can use: open surgery and laparoscopic surgery. Open surgery is the more traditional technique with a larger incision where the surgeon actually gets into the abdominal cavity with his or her hands and finds, isolates the appendix and cuts it off. So there’s a hole in the colon, he closes you up and all done.