Ear Infections?
Fall is coming. The weather is changing. Kids are back in school, and what comes next? They catch a cold, which of course they’ll share with you, and then they start having ear infections. This begs the question: Can chiropractic help ear infections?
As you know, we see a lot of children, and one of the things that is pretty routine for us is to see them coming in with ear infections. Particularly problematic are infections that recur.
So, here’s what happens. Your child has an ear infection. They get an antibiotic. Then, they get another ear infection. They get another antibiotic. They get another infection. They get another antibiotic. By that point, those antibiotics are doing something to the digestive system. That’s a problem. As a good parent, you become concerned.
You run this over a period of months, and before you know it, someone says, “Hey, let’s put some tubes in those ears.” Now, putting tubes in the ears is somewhat of a temporary fix. And it’s major surgery. Who wants to put their child under? What if there was a way to avoid this whole cycle?
Chiropractors don’t treat ear infections. We don’t treat infections. We don’t prescribe antibiotics. Antibiotics treat infections. They work for that. However, when it comes to ear infections, they keep recurring because the problem is the terrain that is favorable to bacterial growth and ear infections. What creates this fertile ground for ear infections to happen again and again is not solved.
Oftentimes, properly applied chiropractic care for those children, gentle, safe, effective chiropractic care, can solve that problem by solving the cause that creates that fertile ground for the bacteria to proliferate.
So, what does that mean? Let’s talk a little bit about what happens when you have an ear infection. The ear has three components. There is an outer ear, the part where you can put a Q-tip in. The Q-tip is going to stop and it’s probably going to be painful when you hit the tympanic membrane. That is actually the source of pain with ear infections. That is the ear drum.
Now, between the ear drum and the inner ear, which is also closed off, there is the middle ear. That middle ear is sort of like a resonance chamber. The middle ear is where you can have an accumulation of fluid. It gets inflamed. It can get fluid filled from a cold or mucous production. It is part of normal healing process. However, if the fluid gets trapped in that middle ear, it’s like anything else in the body or in nature. You put fluid and you let it stagnate, it becomes fertile ground for bacteria, and that is what an ear infection is about.
So, what chiropractors do that essentially solve this problem of accumulating fluid in the middle ear? First of all, the chiropractic adjustment is going to help the muscles around that middle ear that create tension and close off the Eustachian tube, the drainage tube. It is the tube that drains that middle year, that should be draining it. If there are spasms of the upper neck muscles, it will block that tube off. Getting adjusted relaxes that and normalizes function so the body can drain that by itself.
The other thing that chiropractors do through adjustments is that we’re modifying the mechanics of the neck and head posture. We improve how the neck is moving. We’re helping normalize the process. We’re making it return back to what it should be. What it should be results into natural drainage.
Now, when you drain that swamp, that fertile ground for bacteria, the bacteria can’t grow anymore and you stop having this recurring downward cycle of ear infections to tubes to messed up digestive tract to messed up immune system. This destructive path, in the long run, will creates really undesirable outcome for those children.
If your kids have ear infections, it might be a really smart thing to look into whether that’s a problem that can be solved, an issue that can be resolved. After more than 30 years of practice, we have seen hundreds and hundreds of kids with problems like this and we’ve helped them. The great majority do wonderfully well, and it’s all natural, it’s safe, and it’s pretty quick, too.
So, for our children’s sake, short term comfort, their future health and so you can sleep at night because they’re not having fever and crying. So that you can go to work because you don’t have to stay home with them. So that you don’t have to give them pills and drugs that are going to have long-term consequences and harmful side effects, check out chiropractic for them. It’s really a great option.