Hi, my dd was diagnosed with glue ear aged 3 1/2 ish. She was apparantly lip reading almost all the time and it had consequently taken us a while to realise there was a problem. She was tested at the hospital and we were told that her hearing level was at 60 - 80 decibels and that she needed grommets asap.
So... I came home and spent a LOT of time on the internet. I researched everything I could think of including possible causes of glue ear, alternative treatments, what do they do in other countries, what would happen if she didn't receive grommets, what could the outcome be if she did have grommets. We discovered that the uk had (at the time) the highest rate of grommets being given to children.
We made a descision based on all the info we could find.
We did not take our daughter to have grommets.
The 1st things on a list of possible causes that I came across on (i think) an aussie site were, smoking around the child causing congestion in the eusation tube (sp?) or an inner ear infection which has not been properly cleared causing the blockage, or an allergic reaction causing excessive mucus in the sinuses also causing blockage to the eustation tube, there were more things on the list including enlarged adenoids blocking the opening to the tube but I do not remember the whole list.
For this reason the reccomended course of action was to keep the child away from smoke at all times, give the child a course of antibiotics, try the child with antihistamines and or childrens sudofed to see if there was an improvement, remove adenoids( obviously one at a time )
All of these things were reccomended before grommets because although grommets can be a perfect solution there can be lasting effects.
With my dd, none of us smoke, she was given a course of antibiotics which had no effect, so we tried the antihistamines, no effect. We were reccomended to put her on childrens echinacea to decrease her chances of getting colds etc as any cold would make it much worse, there was a definate improvement in her hearing .
Then the gp gave her a 7 day course of childrens sudafed. Within 48hrs there was a massive difference and her voice had changed - it was not anywhere so nasal. By the end of the 7 days she could hear the clicking noise the indicators in the car made and bird song outside the window.
It was amazing!
Within 24hrs of being back off the sudafed she had lost it. She was deaf again and the nasal voice was back. We decided there must be something in her environment / diet or something that was causing her to block up. GP tenuously agreed.
I spoke to the staff in the shop where I had bought the echinacea. It transpired the echinacea also contained plantain which has a decongesting effect, they reccomended that the most likely allergens would be in her diet and would be milk and gluten.
So with some worries over messing with her diet we cut out all milk and put her onto soya. It took about 2 weeks and there was gradual improvement from about day 4, we had her hearing tested after the 2 weeks and she had gone from 80 decibels to 20. She was off the list for needing grommets. We reintroduced a very small amount of milk once a week just to be sure that her gut would continue to produce the bacteria that enables it to break down milk in the hope that one day she will be able to have milk as a normal part of her diet.
She is now 5 1/2 she has had 1 ear infection in all that time and it has only happened because we were reccomended to increase her milk quantities to see if she was still reacting.
She can get away with cheese and small amounts of cooked milk, milk contained within things sausage rolls etc is not too bad, but yoghurt / yogurt drinks are a major no no and its definately accumulative. If she has too much in the course of a week her sinuses block solid.
I realise that this is not going to be the problem that all children who are reccomended grommets have, but I do think its worth knowing what was causing her problem, as it might help someone elses dc.