Homeopathic consideration for resistant endodontic bacteria : An comparative disc diffusion study.

BACKGROUND

Homeopathy is one of the commonly used systems of complementary or alternative medicine. The present study was conducted with an aim to compare the antibacterial efficacy of two commonly used homeopathic medicaments acid benzoicum 30C (SBL Pvt Ltd) and silicea 6C (SBL Pvt Ltd) with that of calcium hydroxide (Deepti Ltd) as intracanal medicament against (ATCC-29212).

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The test organism used for the study was . Petri plates with 20 ml of sheep blood agar were inoculated with 0.1 ml of the microbial suspensions. The medicaments to be tested for antimicrobial efficacy against were divided into three groups: Group A (acid benzoicum), Group B (silicea), and Group C (calcium hydroxide). The antimicrobial activity of each medicament was measured and expressed in terms of the mean of the diameter of zone of inhibition (in mm) produced by each extract at the end of the incubation period. ANOVA and Tukey's honestly-significant difference test were used for the intergroup comparison. < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

RESULTS

Group A (acid benzoicum) showed the maximum zone of inhibition against Gram-positive (17.2 ± 0.65), and the difference between the groups related to the antibacterial activity was highly significant ( < 0.001). A statistically significant difference was observed between the three groups on the intergroup comparison ( < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

In the present study, antimicrobial activity of the acid benzoicum extract was the highest followed by silicea extract and then calcium hydroxide.