A Bionic *** !

[Lynlw]

Just a word of caution regarding pulling every tiny study from PubMed. They may not actually represent what they appear to.

If you read the way this case study was set up, the eight manually chosen cases who had IE (one of whom did use prophylactic antibiotics) were manually matched with another group of 24 who specifically did not get endocaditis (over a third of whom did not take antibiotics) who were individually cherry-picked from hundreds of cases.

Only 32 people total, each manually chosen. It would be very difficult to see the validity of this method, and how there could not be concern that the outcome could be gerrymandered for the results that the writer desired. This looks very much like a Yale med student's thesis, intended to come out the way the supervisory counsellor expected it to. Being in Yale has its perks, including getting published.

Nor does this hold a candle to over 50 years' worth of data involving thousands of cases and numerous studies which were handled as they appeared, rather than carefully chosen and constructed to a model that bears no statistical validity. When you cherry-pick your subjects from a large field, you eliminate the integrity of the sample.

While most of what has been presented has been both interesting and informative, this one paper absolutely fails to impress.

Best wishes,

I understand that and am not posting every tiny study, This just happen to be one of them. The problem is there were no big random studies done that I can find. and my point was these were 7 people who were high risk for BE and did not PA for the dentist and ended up with it shortly after. Since only about 1/3 of the people that get BE get it shortly after going to the dentist, I would expect people would use PA and still get BE., like many of the members here. I would be more concerned about studies that 100% of them got it following the dentist and no PA.

But my main thing was I'm not sure saying it has been proven NOT to prevent BE is a fact.

It is an individual choice, but I personaly at this point in time think the US AHA guidelines make sense, since cost wasn't one of the deciding factors. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 5 years.