Ear inflammation is one of the most common diseases in young children, and most often otitis occurs even in infants, that is, at the earliest age. The explanation for this is the same: internal passages and partitions, in particular the Eustachian tube, have not yet been fully formed for a child of up to a year, so that microbes from the nasopharynx easily penetrate into the middle ear, as well as the liquid: water, milk, and mixture.
If the baby has a cold, a runny nose, a sore throat, while swimming in his ears, water has gone or you have inaccurately cleaned the ear canal - all this can cause otitis in the baby.
How to recognize otitis in infants?
Inflammation of the ear is usually quite vividly manifested:
- It can be a temperature that reaches 39-40 degrees by night, while the child screams, turns his head.
- Sucking can exacerbate the ear pain, so the child, only attached to the chest or bottle, sharply throws suck, turns away, shakes his head and cries.
- Most likely, the baby will feel pain when touched to the ear, to the cartilage, which is located at the entrance to the auricle.
- It happens that parents can not understand for a long time what is happening with the child, and then they find out from his ear a "trickle", usually in the morning after awakening. Purulent otitis in infants is often opened at night, then on the ear, the child's cheek, but the pillow can be found withered traces of pus.
All these signs of otitis in the baby are difficult to overlook, although there is also a form when there is no discharge from the ear (catarrhal otitis), and other symptoms are poorly expressed. Sometimes the baby can show intestinal distress and vomiting.
Treatment of otitis in an infant
In no case can you treat otitis in the baby yourself. Incorrect treatment threatens the baby with a mass of serious complications, including deafness and the transition of infection to the membranes of the brain, damage to the heart muscle, lungs and other organs. Therapy of the disease should be dealt with by an ENT doctor, and it is unlikely to do without antibiotics. From my mother's side, the task is to try to ease the baby's condition and accelerate his recovery with additional measures:
- To reduce the ear pain can be with the help of dry heat. As a compress, a large lump of cotton wool, nested in a cap on a sore eye, is suitable.
- A warming compress made of vodka is done if the child does not have a temperature. Around the ear, place the gauze moistened with warm vodka, cover the ear with cotton wool and put on the cap. You do not need to keep such a compress for more than 3 hours.
- Of the folk remedies, you can advise you to put a geranium leaf in your ear (relieves pain and swelling), gauze, soaked with fresh aloe juice, cotton wool and honey.
On this, parental "initiative" should end. No drops in the ears without a doctor's appointment can not be buried, it's dangerous! Those droplets that the doctor will prescribe (the dosage and the frequency of application you will learn from him), your task is to properly dig in. Do it this way:
- Drops should be warm, warm them in water or hold in your hand.
- Put the baby on his side, grab the auricle with his fingers and gently pull it toward the nape to maximize the opening of the passage.
- Press the pipette (according to the number of prescribed drops), place a piece of fleece in your ear.
If the eyelet flows, carefully clean it from the discharge, but only from the outside, not climbing inside the auricle. At a temperature and severe pain, give the child an anesthetic (Nurofen in syrup, a candle).
Otitis has the property of transitioning to a relapsing form, the infection can "walk" around the child's ear-nose-throat-nose pathway, causing maxillary sinusitis , laryngitis and other diseases, making the baby a regular visitor to an ENT doctor. Therefore, it is always good to cure inflammation, do not run any cold symptoms - it's better to be safe than to "reward" the crumb with chronic otitis media.