A patient is seen in the emergency room with reproducible right lower quadrant tenderness. The approximate incidence of finding a normal appendix on right lower quadrant exploration in similar nonselected patients is which of the following:

c. 20%

Appendectomy is the most common surgical procedure performed on an emergency basis in Western medicine. Appendicitis has a negative appendectomy rate of approximately 22% to 26% in broad based reviews. The perforation rate is as low as 3.6% in a subset of young males, although this rises substantially when the children or the elderly are included. Likewise, young females represent a group at particularly high risk for other intraabdominal pathology.