Otitis media
Written by:What is otitis media?
Otitis media is the infection of the middle ear cavities. There is a time in life that is childish, from the year until about 7 years, when these children are especially vulnerable to this type of infection, because they are small, because immunologically they are weaker, because they catch a lot of flu and there is a series of circumstances that condition this fact.
What should alert parents?
Normally the type of consultation that we have is on the one hand typically the child who presents with earaches, are usually recurrent pain and first treatment is done with antibiotics, but then there is a group of children in whom otitis no longer presents in such a florid way and are children who are presented as distracted, children who are nervous, at school we are alerted that classes are not well and parents sometimes notice as a lack of attention, a clueless child. And all this in the set of a child who also gets a lot of cold, that has a lot of mucus, should alert us to anañizar the hearing so that there are no sequelae for life.
How is otitis media diagnosed?
The otitis media evidently has to see the clinical part that we have commented previously and, later, our role will be first to determine if there is disease through a microscopic analysis of the ear you can see the state of the tympanic membrane and it will give us a great information to the respect, and on the other hand audiological tests that can determine whether or not there is a hearing loss. It is clear that in children performing an audiometry is not easy, they are tests that require collaboration and therefore there are very specific and special tests for the child that will determine their hearing levels. All this together will tell us what we have to do with each child, there will be problematic children with a great affectation of the ear and others with little. In total of all this, in some cases it will be determined that we will do a medical treatment, control, evolution and in others we may have to opt for surgical treatment to definitively solve the problem.
Which is the treatment?
The first-time treatment of middle ear infections is with antibiotics, usually given in the emergency room for otitis or given by the pediatrician and, subsequently, if we go to the phase in which the situation becomes chronic, we often have to resort to the surgical treatment that is simple, is to insert a ventilation tube into the tympanic membrane, the fact of entering air heals the entire mucous of the middle ear and this allows us to fully recover the functionality of it. This drain will be placed about 8 months and will jump spontaneously.
Can we get a full recovery?
Yes of course. All of this we do to avoid any kind of sequel in the ear of the child and that drag the rest of his life. Healing is practically every child, we are 90% successful. Obviously there are children who are more difficult to insist on treatment, but good evolution is what marks the rule of all this type of pathology.
