Ear Infections (Part two) (much of this article was paraphrased and taken from an article by Dr. Richard Mittleman Circa 1985)
There is no way to know for certain whether there actually are more children with ear infections these days, but this does seem to be the case. One of the reasons that there appears to be so many children with ear infections, is that they are often diagnosed when there is no infection present. I am suspicious when parents say that they were told that their child had a mild ear infection. What the phrase “mild ear infection” really means is that the ear drum didn’t look quite right, the doctor thought an infection might be present, the parents were anxious, the doctor was anxious and so a diagnosis of a “mild ear infection” was made in order to justify treating the child with antibiotics.
How can you as a parent know if a diagnosis of an ear infection is warranted? When is it reasonable for you as a parent to suspect that an ear infection may be present?
For a lot of parents there is a certain amount of mystery involved when the doctor looks into a child’s ear. After all the doctor is looking into a part of the body which most parents have never seen for themselves. I am about to reveal this great mystery! There isn’t a whole lot in there. What is seen is the ear canal, which is a very short passageway and the ear drum.
A normal ear drum is pearly white. When a doctor looks into a child’s ear and says that the ear is infected, what he is really saying is that the ear drum doesn’t look normal and he presumes that there is an infection. Most ear infections are in the middle ear which is behind the ear drum. When there is an infection in the middle ear it causes the ear drum to become fed in color.
It sounds pretty simple so far, but there are times when the ear drum is pearly white and definitely normal, there are times when the ear drum is beet red and definitely abnormal and there are times when it is some color in between those two extremes. It is those in between times that can be tricky.
There are many times when an ear drum will have an appearance such that one doctor would say that there was an infection and another doctor would say that there wasn’t. Another factor is that the doctor is only seeing the color and character of the ear drum for the five seconds that he looks at it. He doesn’t know what it looked like five minutes before he saw the child and he doesn’t know what it is going to look like five hours after.
“Some years ago I examined my daughter’s ears during an illness and decided that it looked like she had an ear infection. I was faced with the decision to take her to the Family Doctor and put her on the usual 10 day antibiotic regimen or check her upper cervical alignment for subluxation, increase the Tuna Omega 3’s and Calcium Lactate in the diet. My wife and I decided to be patient and go natural and we were glad we did. I checked her ear again later the same day. It was perfectly normal!” Dr. Weisberg
This observation has been born out many times over in my practice. If the middle ear is truly infected, it can take two or more weeks before the ear drum looks completely normal again, but over and over again I have seen children whose ear drums are normal one or two days after being started on an antibiotic by another physician. These children never had an ear infection in the first place. I shudder to think how many parents have fought with their children four time a day for ten days to get them to take an antibiotic which they never needed in the first place and which exposes them to the risk of allergic reactions and other side effects!
Not only can the doctor be fooled by the color of the ear drum which he looks at only one time before making a diagnosis which commits the child to ten days of antibiotics, but there are things other than infections which can make the ear drums look various shades of pink or red. Just as crying and fever make a child’s face look flushed (red because more blood is flowing to the face), so can crying and fever make the ear drums look “flushed” and possibly lead to an erroneous diagnosis of an ear infection. Most young children are crying and have a fever at the time that they are in the doctor’s examining room having their ears examined.
The point of all this is that often a doctor cannot tell just by looking at the ear drums for that brief moment in his office whether or not an infection is actually present. I think that this is the explanation for why, if you take your child to the doctor often enough (which is probably too often), more likely than not you will be told some time or another that your child has an ear infection. This is not to say, of course, that ear infections do not occur, they do. What I am saying is that I think that ear infections are very much over-diagnosed. I also think that they are very much over-treated, but I’ll get to that in a minute. (I will finish this soon so stay tuned for what to do when you suspect an ear infection. We will discuss innate intelligence, vertebral subluxation complex, reflexology and more.)