Ear Infections in Children: Skipping the Antibiotics

In the past decade, debate has waged on against the over usage of antibiotics to treat a child's ear infection. Doctors now refuse, in many cases, to prescribe antibiotics, instead opting to wait and see if the ear drains by itself. Is this a good thing? For some children, I am certain it works. However, I feel that doctors are also doing a serious injustice by again treating children as a group rather than an individual.

My own son has been plagued by ear infections since he was a baby. At age seven, his adenoids were removed and tubes were put in both ears. At that point, his hearing loss was at 40%, so the procedure was necessary to try to remedy the hearing loss. First, the operation scared him to no end. His surgeon had told him that mom and dad would be right there, and he woke up in a strange room without any sign of us. To this day, he is still fearful of undergoing another surgical procedure.

Throughout the past six years, he has had a few ear infections. Each time, I have been told that antibiotics are not an option and to wait the ear infection out. Last summer, his right ear drum ruptured waiting it out. Only after it had ruptured did his doctor state that maybe they should have given us antibiotics sooner.

This past weekend, our son woke us up at 10:30 pm because his ear hurt. He was at the tail end of a cold, so we feared this would happen. A call do our doctor's answering service told us all we needed to know, they wanted us to wait it out and see if it went away. I pulled out the homeopathic ear drops that are supposed to relieve pain. They don't work much for my son. By 3:00 am, one ear drum ruptured and the second followed an hour later. The next day being a Sunday, they couldn't see him because the doctor is closed. So I brought him in Monday and the first words out of our doctor's mouth were that maybe we shouldn't have waited so long. Obviously, this ear infection moved quick from the onset of the pain, but our doctor is closed weekends, so I asked him what more could we have done? His response was that there really is nothing because we still cannot have the antibiotics.

In three weeks, when the eardrum has healed enough for hearing to be fully restored, we have to return our son for a series of hearing tests to make sure there is no scarring causing his hearing to be affected. This only reinforces my opinion that every child should be given antibiotics based on his or her medical history, not just the general medical publics new opinion on antibiotics.

In the long run, I think the medical profession really needs to sit back and look what they are now doing to some children. Hearing loss is a permanent issue. Perhaps in children where eardrums have been known to rupture, antibiotics need to be given quickly to prevent any long term damage. I just wish they would learn to agree that not every child should be held to the general rules of medicine.