“I didn’t think it was a possibility," said Katy Golden, who had her tonsils taken out when she was 5 years old Vanessa Etienne is a Staff Writer for PEOPLE on the Health team. She joined the brand in ...

Roughly 290,000 tonsillectomies are performed in children under 15 years old every year in the United States. Though the tonsil hospital closed decades ago, tonsillectomies still remain one of the ...

Did you get your tonsils taken out as a kid? For people who grew up before the 1980s, the surgery and its attendant promise of icecream and jelly afterwards were almost a rite of passage. But while ...

Your tonsils are the two round pads of tissue at the back of your throat. They’re part of your immune system. When germs enter your mouth or nose, your tonsils sound the alarm and call the immune ...

Tonsils serve as sort of a filter in your body. Chances are many of you have had them removed, but two recent studies differ on when and if that’s necessary. Dr. Teresa Chan-Leveno is chief of ...

People have four kinds of tonsils. The term tonsils usually refers to your palatine tonsils, the ones that can be seen at the back of your throat. But tonsillar tissue also includes the lingual tonsil ...

Holes in the tonsils — or tonsillar crypts — enable the tonsils to fight infection by detecting what is entering the body. Some conditions and situations that affect the holes in the tonsils can cause ...

White spots, blotches, or streaks on the tonsils can be a sign of various conditions, including strep throat and oral thrush. Treatment is available for most of these conditions. The tonsils are part ...

I used to think of my tonsillectomy as a one-off procedure I’d had when I was in kindergarten, looking back fondly on the days recovering and sipping Slurpees. A decade later, I was taken by surprise ...

Tonsils, everyone is born with them, but what do they do? “Nobody really knows exactly how they work or what their function is,” says Dr. Ryan Winters, a board-certified Otolaryngologist Head and Neck ...

Those mysterious white spots appearing on your tonsils can trigger immediate concern, and rightfully so. While they might seem like a minor inconvenience, these patches often signal your body’s battle ...