You are listening to episode 76, eartubes. When does your child need them and what is the management?

Welcome to this episode where I have Dr. Jordan Glixman. He is an ear nose and throat surgeon

in private practice at Newton Welsley Hospital in Massachusetts. And he's a part-time lecture

at Harvard Medical School. We are talking about eartubes today. If you have not listened to the

other episode we recorded today about tonsils and adenoids, make sure you listen to that one.

Welcome, Jordan. How are you doing? Oh, I'm great. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for coming on. Again, I'm so excited that we could record two episodes and get this

education out there on this episode. We're talking about eartubes. And so if you listen to the

other episode we talked about indications of meeting your tonsils and adenoids and move for your

child. But in this one we're talking about eartubes. So my first question is when do we say hey,

eartubes may be something a child may need? Yeah, that's a great question and probably the

most important one whenever we're talking about surgical procedures, making sure that we're choosing

the right thing for the right child. So probably the most common two reasons that we see are for

children that get a lot of the ear infections and then also children that have a fluid in their

ears for a prolonged period of time causing them with difficulty with speech development. And that's

typically because the fluid restricts their ability to hear and they don't hear well then it

becomes hard to replicate speech. They're hearing in their environment and there's a lot of other

more specific guess situations including if a patient has a complication because of any ear

infection or a child that's flying a lot with their parents and getting ear pain when they

travel or some other much more rare indications or reasons for having tubes put it.

And so we're going to get into more of like the purpose of an ear tube and like what it kind of

does physiologically. But I want to talk about the two main ones that you mentioned, the speech

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