Yesterday somebody said to me, “Oh, I didn’t know you were in the medical field.”
Hah! I don’t think having both your parents be doctors counts as being “in the medical field;” but on the other hand, seeing two doctors approach life and its various maladies with the utmost practicality has given me some license to practice my own form of quack medicine.
My parents’ medical philosophy in a nutshell: REST – take a couple of aspirin if you can’t hack the pain.
Or maybe I just like developing theories and then convincing other people to accept them as truth.
As a parent trying to avoid contact with the medical establishment (Bella didn’t meet a doctor outside my parents until she was four years old; and she has only tried aspirin once) I was heartily afraid of ear-aches. Ear-aches seemed to be the ultimate boogeyman of childhood ailments; get it once and you were on a spiraling downward path of misdiagnoses, bouts of antibiotics, and eventual tubal surgery. My paranoia led to extreme vigilance about Bella’s ear health.
Now granted, Bella’s overall ear health may have more due to hereditary factors than my quacking and fussing – but we did have a strict ear care policy:
If your ear aches, administer a few drops of ear oil. I used to love the Medicine Wheel brand of ear oil, but it is no longer available. I pick the ear oils now based on what used to be the main ingredients of Medicine Wheel ear oil: mullein, St. John’s wort, and garlic.
Most importantly, keep your ear warm. Yes, I said warm. Just like you might keep your throat warm if you had a sore throat except instead of a muffler a couple of cotton balls will do the trick.
This is what Bella and I do whenever our ears bother us and our ear-aches seem to go away in a matter of days.
I’d be curious to hear if this remedy works for you.