No parent likes their child to suffer the unsettling ear pain. Many parents opt for pain medication and antibiotics, and many doctors prescribe them, on the assumption that an ear infection is causing the pain.
But here's the rub: I've been looking in ears for 2 decades, and I can tell you that the number of times there has been an obvious bacterial ear infection as part of the picture is low. In fact, there have only been maybe a dozen times where I've thought antibiotics might be appropriate. The first time in family practice where I was asked to treat an ear infection that had already been diagnosed by the family's primary care physician, I looked in the ear to confirm and --- there was no infection!
That said, the pain in the kid's ear was very real. And so might the pain be in your kid's ear. The key to understanding ear pain is to understand 2 key points:
1. In kids, the Eustachian tube, the air tube that allows for pressure regulation on both sides of the eardrum that goes to the back of the throat, is more horizontal in kids because their jaw hasn't grown yet to make it more vertical. This is why most kids "grow out of" ear issues.
2. The Eustachian tube has a little piece of tonsil around the throat end. The tonsils are your defence tissues, swelling if you swallow or inhale something that has activated your immune system into action. When they swell, they make air passage less easy, and this can put a lot of tension on the eardrum, causing pain.
The temporary solution to this conundrum is to use something that improves the state of the Eustachian tube tonsil. That is why we use Septonsil -- it is a remedy that stimulates flow through the lymph system and shrinks the tonsils down so that they can't create those conditions.
The permanent solutions is figuring out why the tonsils are so activated and swell easily. You might need to rule out food allergies, environmental reactions, or other causes of dysregulated immune activity. Call us at Resonance Wellness, we can help!
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