How To Treat Your Child's Earache

How do I treat my child's earache?

The recommendations on ear infections have actually changed recently. It used to be that any ear infection we treated with antibiotics. But nowadays, what we do is we often wait about forty-eight hours to see if the ear infection will go away, because some viral ear infections will just go away on their own, and don't need antibiotics. So, how do we tell? If your child is up all night screaming, saying that their ear hurts, they have high fever, they come in here and we a bulging, red ear with pus behind it, that's an ear we're going to treat because we know they're going to feel better tomorrow morning, and you're going to feel better tomorrow morning. And after twenty-four hours of antibiotics, most children start feeling better, but the course of the antibiotics, again, is usually around ten days. If you came in just because you have a cold, or even a well-visit, and we happen to see an ear infection, but your child's not complaining about it, that may be a time when we say, "You know what? Let's just wait and couple of days and see what happens." It may just go away, but if they start waking up in the middle of the night and complaining, or developing fever, then we'll look at it again and see if we need to do antibiotics.