Analgesia requirements
We found increased requirement for analgesia in the microscopic group at day 1 post-operatively, and an increased requirement for opioid analgesia at day 1 and day 2 post-operatively in the microscopic group (Table 3; Table 4). Kakehata et al. kept patients as inpatients for the course of their stay, and only offered hospital prescribed NSAIDs.4 They detected significantly lower analgesia use post-operatively in their endoscopic compared to microscopic group from day 1 to day 7. Although Salman et al. also found a trend towards lower painkiller use in patients who were operated endoscopically, these results did not reach significance.5 Baazil et al. reported that the endaural microscopic group required half as much medication as their retro-auricular microscopic and endaural transmeatal groups, a result which is unexplained.6 However, their endoscopic group had a lower requirement for opioids for pain control post-operatively compared to the other groups, consistent with our findings. We therefore believe that the current evidence points towards lesser analgesia requirements after EES.