Dr. Mercola: Taking Out Adenoids Does Not Help Recurrent Ear Infections

Taking Out Adenoids Does NOT Help Ear Infections--Imagine That!!
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
March 10 2004 | 3,385 views

Conclusions from a study showed that removal of the adenoids, often associated with swollen tonsils, as the first surgical treatment with children the ages of 10 to 24 months with recurrent middle ear infections, was not effective in preventing further episodes.
Approximately one-third of all children suffer from recurrent ear infections. A study by the Oulu University Hospital in Finland was done to determine how effective removing adenoids were in treating these frequent ear infections.
Participants of the study included 180 children, aged 10 months to 2 years, with recurrent acute otitis media. The goals of the study were to reduce pain, fever, parental anxiety and doctor’s visits.

However, researchers concluded that, although the surgery slightly diminished the risk of recurring middle ear infections, the beneficial effect, if any, was so small that they did not recommend it as a primary treatment among this age group.



British Medical Journal February 28, 2004; 328:487 (Free Full-Text Article)

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

It is not shocking that surgically removing a child's adenoids does not at all help to reduce middle ear infections. The real surprise is that physicians have clung on so long to the surgical model to treat this common infection of childhood. Over one-third of children wind up with these infections so this is not a small issue.

The tragedy is that this is one of the easiest problems in medicine to treat. All it requires is an understanding of basic nutritional medicine. The key is to remove the child from all pasteurized dairy. Raw dairy products are usually well tolerated. Removal of sugars and grains that easily convert to sugars, such as wheat, is also typically required.

Adding cod liver oil usually dramatically improves the immune response and including fermented foods also increases the beneficial bacteria in the gut to fight infections. There are only a small handful of cases of many thousands of these infections that I treated over the past 20 years that haven't responded to these simple measures.

For acute ear infections adding some fresh breast milk into the ear canal is typically a very effective method to bring quick relief to the problem.

Although the breast milk works better, if you don’t have access to any another option would be to crush a fresh clove of garlic, dissolve it in olive oil then put a few drops of this solution into the ear canal.

If your child is very young he or she may not be able to tell you that their ear is hurting. In these cases here are six signs that your child may have an ear infection:

They pull on their ear
Their ear hurts
There is drainage from the ear
A fever is present (could mean an infection)
They are irritable or sleeping poorly

this is interesting, i never knew they removed adenoids for ear infections! i thought grommets were the best 'surgical option'
its interesting about the dairy, DD2 had 3 infections in 10 weeks from between 7 and 10 months and 3 (1 comfirmed and 2 unconfirmed)bouts of glue ear, all before she commenced consuming dairy!
i have been considering and will now definatly persue seeing if she has an issue with dairy via a nautropath as were now battling a sinus infection though having said that she has hardly any dairy. shes not a fan!!
the only indication we get of ear issues is her poor(er) sleeping.

thanks for posting kell!

Wow that is pretty extreme! DD1 seemed to have constant ear infections from 8m - 20m and our GP would not even consider any action until she was 3! We tried chiro, food exclusions, naturopath.....
Olive - the crap sleep or lack of any was often our only clue. it is seriously hard yakka.

mak have you done anything now shes 3 or has she grown out of them???

were getting a referal after the next infection or fluid issue, im demanding one, id just prefer she was looked at, it sucks taht your GP made you wait! our said after 5-6 infections in 12 months

Olive - we took some drastic action at ~ 18m which involved some long term medication. This is not for everyone and involved lots of thought/research but did fix things up. My GP is awesome so I was not unhappy with her reasoning rather frustrated at the anxst we were all going through. I have a great ENT who I rang to ask some questions and he was excellent too (he took my tonsils out a few years ago and is a surgeon who seeks alternatives to surgery rather than be overzealous). I did have a friend whose son was the same age and had grommets inserted several times.
She has had no issues since, well ear related, lol! Good luck!