In a recent study by NA Abreu and Andrew Goldberg from UCSF dept of Rhinology, they demonstrated the importance of the kinds of bacteria in the sinuses of persons with chronic sinusitis. When you wipe out the good bacteria, then new bad guys show up.
Their research points to the importance of keeping the good guys.

Their article reinforces my own experience using methods to increase normal nasal cilia movement and natural immunity.
Normally nasal cilia sweep out the bad bacteria; after a sinus infection, cilia movement slows down due to the toxins. If nasal cilia remain impaired, then bacteria can remain in place and multiply, causing another sinus infection.

My typical patient who responds to restoring nasal cilia has the following history:
She had a sinus infection in January and got well with antibiotic; then another infection in March and got well with antibiotic, and another one in September. Restoring natural nasal cilia movement was vital to getting well.

For me, if steps had been done in January to restore nasal cilia, then the second and third infections could have been avoided! Irrigation with a pulse/wave irrigation such as the Hydro Pulse Nasal/Sinus irrigator, pulses at a rate designed to restore the cilia pulsation.

How much do probiotics and yogurt play in all this? Which probiotic is best? We don’t have exact answers . The authors found that “in healthy people, a bacteria called Lactobacillus sakei seems to help the body naturally ward off sinusitis. In laboratory experiments, inoculating mice with this one bacterium defended them against the condition.”

In my experience, taking yogurt that you like, that agrees with you, or a probiotic that agrees with you is important to maximize natural immunity and recover from prior antibiotics that kill good bacteria as well as the bad.

My conclusion from this article for patients with sinusitis issues:

a. take yogurt/probiotic
b. use humming to help restore nasal cilia movement
c. use Hydro Pulse Nasal/Sinus Irrigation in order to stimulate and restore nasal cilia movement
d. Drink warm tea, lemon and honey to maximize cilia movement.

I have seen this program work for my patients, and the UCSF research certainly supports this method, in my opinion.

An additional advantage to this program is that once your nasal cilia are back to normal, there is no need to continue using the Hydro Pulse Nasal/Irrigator. You don’t need to be more normal.

My thanks to Andrew Goldberg, MSCE, MD, the director of rhinology and sinus surgery at UCSF and a co-author on the paper, and Nicole A Abreu and other researchers.

The article, “Sinus Microbiome Diversity Depletion and Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum Enrichment Mediates Rhinosinusitis” by Nicole A. Abreu, Nabeetha A. Nagalingam, Yuanlin Song, Frederick C. Roediger, Steven D. Pletcher, Andrew N. Goldberg, and Susan V. Lynch appears in the September 12, 2012, issue of Science Translational Medicine.