Ear Disorders Pt1: Middle Ear Infection Symptoms & Otitis Media Causes | Ruptured Eardrum Treatment
Hello my name is dr scott young with hearing solutions centers and today we’re going to talk to you about the middle ear coming right up so when you have this middle ear i want to show you a different way that we’re going to do our videos today thank you first to oddigy group audigy group builds these really cool quick videos now they have some sound in the
Background i’m going to mute the sound so i can yap over the top of it but you’re going to see this over the whole screen and you’ll just have a quick view of what the ear does so our first video here is called the middle ear wave and in the middle ear wave what you’re going to see is that sound comes into the ear it hits the eardrum and the eardrum starts to
Vibrate in there so she’s gonna play this so probably a second time so as we do that the middle ear waves and has that sound that comes in and then it’s different in different parts of the ear drum so high pitches go to one spot and lower pitches go toward more toward the middle then it it goes into a piston motion so the sound is going in and pushing through
To the inner ear now we’re not going to talk about the inner ear at all we’re just going to deal with the middle ear now that’s when everything works perfectly and so we’re going to talk about this thing called otitis otitis means disease of the ear so whether it’s no that doesn’t mean exactly where okay otitis media means middle otitis externa is our first one
And the otitis externa is of the outer ear now most people before we do this video most people think of the outer ear as just this up part out here so for instance if you had an ear piercing and i had one of those in college and on my ear piercing in college if i had infected ears i would have otitis externa but you could also have an infected ear canal let’s
Say you were using a q-tip so i’m going to show you this little next video right here and as you had a q-tip what would happen is it would redden up and actually swell so you have to be super careful guys of what you do to your ears i see people use bobby pins q-tips i mean all these crazy things to fix this and guys don’t do it okay don’t do it the reality is
That when you do that to your ears you easily could cause problems so you know people will take a bobby pin they’ll take some of you won’t know what that is but i just want you to think of a paper clip and then they kind of uh you know kind of straighten that little puppy out and they’ll get in there scratch their ears ear canal the ear canal is supposed to make
Ear wax now some people make more some people make less just like some people have oily skin or combo skin and other people have very dry skin and sometimes your ear will make more or less now you can mess with your ear by screwing around your eardrum or your ear canal and here’s the funniest thing i had this i know it sounds funny but i’m not trying to be rude
Here but i’ll tell you what this actually this position actually said i’m first year out of out of college it was uh second year so my first year after my residency and this ear physician wrote this in the in the report he said the patient had a misadventure with a q-tip and i had to sit there like what miss adventure what do you mean what he she did is that
She was playing around with her ears and she told me this story and the her kid walked up and said hey mommy boop pop the that thing right through the eardrum it can happen it can be an issue and so what happens first off is that you can cause an infection in the ear canal so that’s otitis externa now in otitis externa you’re probably going to have to have ear
Drops or some type of of antibiotic cream or drops that will go on to that ear canal and your general physician is actually very good at handling that kind of stuff so you’re going to get those ear drops you definitely want to use the whole bottle i i see this all the time as an audiologist and and by the way every medical professional actually interacts with
This whether it’s a physical therapist who’s dealing with an infected leg you know with a person you know after they’ve gotten out of surgery and they’ve had an infection and they’re not taking all their medication you know if you have 10 days of medication take all of your medication all the way through don’t stop when you think you’re sorta better and that’s
What happens with otitis externa if you don’t use all your medication you could have this reappear and then it keeps getting worse and worse so then once you’ve cleaned out your ear meaning like you’re you’re not having that redness that irritation that hurting problem then and you’ve used all your medication then you’re okay okay just don’t go back to what you
Used to be doing now let’s move and shift a little bit to what’s called otitis media otitis disease media means middle so that’s disease of the middle ear so let’s watch our little video right here and you have disease of the middle ear now if you notice there’s a little spot on the bottom that gets that uh fills up with fluid so first off what we have there so
We’re gonna we’re gonna come back to this video i’m gonna show you it twice so as you’re watching me right here so basically there’s on the the top of the mouth we have an opening and that inlet is very close to the nasal passages now i have lots of nasal problems and so what happens is that you can be maybe a centimeter or a few millimeters away from where the
Nase the nose drains out into the hard palate soft palate areas depends on where your your anatomy is and then it flows right over to this opening and that opening goes gets gets infected and then it closes off now that opening when it closes off is going to is going to create a vacuum pressure in the in the middle ear space and that vacuum pressure when it goes
Farther and farther now what will happen to you is you feel like i need to like open up my ear and you’ll you’ll want to do this now one of the things that this happened is called a valsalva maneuver started in world war ii so what you would do is you’d hold your nose and i’m not going to do this because it hurts my nose with my nasal problems but you hold your
Nose and blow through and you’ll pop out your ears now physicians actually good ear nose and throat physicians will actually tell you to do this maybe five or ten times a day you’re just trying to pop out that pressure problem it’s because that that space that has the ability that you know have to have to have to have the regulation will be closed off and as
That closed off area happens fluid will fill up it sucks it out from the middle ear uh cavities around it and so it fills up with this fluid first off it’s a serious a serous level fluid so it’s just a clear fluid it’s not infected but if it gets worse and worse and stays in there it’ll have an orange or excuse me a green or a yellow tint to it depending upon
What type of bacterial infections going on in the ear now so what they do is that you’ll have this fluid in there and then what you’ll have is a pretty significant hearing loss now if you have perfect hearing up at zero decibels across the board we’ll talk about that in another video at zero’s decibels and you might have a drop of 30 decibels in perceptual terms
That’s a 300 percent worse hearing you’re going to say i’m deaf and i hear this all the time i’m deaf i can’t hear anything the reality is is that you have what we even just call an audiologist say this it’s a mild hearing loss now it no we have correctly changed those terminology from when i was in grad school to educationally significant hearing loss so a
Kid who has an ear infection i mean she’s going to have a lot of troubles hearing the speech information around her so she’s going to miss out whether she’s missing out on speech sounds if she’s had it all of her life she might have delays of this you know all those different sounds that she can’t hear so she doesn’t know how to hear to say that so that becomes
Part of the issues and and we have that and that educational problem this is the situation that your physician will go in and do a couple things first off i’m going to show you the first thing sometimes the eardrum will perforate excuse me perforate so you’ll see that hole in there and what happens is that hole that hole sets up and and then just floats out
All the material and so you’ll see this a kid wakes up and there’s there’s blood a little bit and some of the fluid it’s kind of a different color fluid that’s draining out of the ear so that kid has had a perforation now frankly the perforation hurts but they actually feel relief right away and they can hear and you think everything’s fine no if it’s too big
Of a perforation it needs to have tympanoplasty we’ll show you that in a second but when that perforation’s small now if it’s a very small hole the body will kind of grow over it with this fibrous material and just fix it itself okay but you kind of need to have a good ear physician take care of that to just verify that it looks okay an audiologist can help you
As well with that just to verify it looks good now if you have problems with a kid or even an adult who has a problem with the the eardrum they’re they’re filling up with fluid and they can’t hear they will have this little ear tube and you see this little green tube and it’s placed in there they will go and it’s suction out and that’s what you’re kind of seeing
There they’ll suction out all the fluids so it’s like a little vacuum that in the ear you’re sucking out all the fluids so let’s watch this again so we have they will do what’s called a myringotomy excuse me we’re going to flip over here to this one so they’ll do a myrigotomy which is a cut and then they’ll put this little uh tube in there now they can you use
Two different types of tubes one is a permanent and one the other one is a temporary tube now if it’s a plastic tube it’s more of a temporary one which means that there’s three skin layers and it will just kind of you know push its way out and then fall out fall out of the pillow kind of thing if it’s more of a permanent tube that’s a metally tube that means
That someone’s had lots and lots of ear infections so don’t think permanent forever it it may come out after a few years it might stay in there for a very long time so it kind of depends upon which way that physician is looking at it to help take care of that for you now the tympanoplasty only happens no timpano means eardrum plasti which means a surgery it’s
Like plastic surgery just think about that they’re repairing that hole so what happens on the tympanoplasty is this so if we have a hole they’re going to take a flap of skin this is so cool the very first time i ever saw the tympanoplasty i didn’t fully understand it what they sometimes do now not on every case but what they will do is they will cut around
The back of the ear it depends on uh depends on how bad the surgery is but if it’s a really big tympanoplasty they will cut back the ear they got to get into the space and they will drop a piece and it will take a piece of of material from from uh it’s like a muscly thing and they will stretch it and stretch it as the surgery is going on it’s stretching itself
Out and they will lay it across that area and suture around so it’s a six eight weeks before the ear you really cannot go in swimming or any kind of thing that might cause you problems or go up in an airplane you don’t want to have any of that so the tympanoplasty they’ll pack it off and then after a few weeks check your ear but one of the things that we see
As audiologists one of the things that will happen is i’ll look at an ear and i can see the scar tissue now scar tissue means that it was covered up or whether it healed itself or they had a tube and then that healed around it so it’s fine then the other side will look really red see it’s normally a grayish color but it’s very very red and you can see a lot of
Blood vessels that normally is a tympanoplasty and i’ll say hey if you had an ear surgery on this right said yeah how do you know because it looks like that and so it is a great surgery did you know by the way and we’re going to end up with this little part you see ear infections were so bad in the previous time frames i want you to think about basically 1940s
And earlier when ear infections would happen they would stay in the middle ear and that that fluid would would get really gross and then it would seep in to the meningeal layer so go into the bone and go into the meningeal layer and that’s your brain when it would go into the brain it would cause a high enough fever you know when you go up to 100 304 and you
See someone in that sick of a state that’s cooking the brain and then they die from it so people used to die of ear infections because we didn’t have antibiotics when the first penicillins came out in between world war one and world war ii when we had that penicillin it made a big difference in the people so one of the great areas is to have the penicillin that
Happen but they also use in the 50s and 60s they used to use something wacky they used to use cigarette paper now cigarette paper actually has a striated kind of thing and they would lay it on there and kind of just hold it into place you know kind of glue slight glue and they would lay it in place and then they would take it off because the ear would the the the
Tympanic membrane or the eardrum would grow around it so it would give it a place for it to move across and grow in it’s a kind of a cool unique way of doing that now obviously when you had a really bad ear drum you know they didn’t have much they could do sometimes they would try to do the earliest tympanic tympanoplasties but it wasn’t very good and you could
Have a lot of troubles with that but frankly from about the 90s and beyond you know tympanoplasties are very very good now any audiologist has been around for a while you know i started in the early 90s i saw a lot of really gross tympanoplasties it wasn’t that they were bad it just was done in the 70s or 60s and they they had they didn’t have the techniques
And the abilities they do today so this is our first of our series and we’re going to talk next time about the ear bones which is otosclerosis and stapendectomy and cholesteatomas we’ll kind of give a little bit of a wrap up when we show that so thank you so much if you like what we did push like talk to us there subscribe to the channel thank you so much you
Transcribed from video
Ear Disorders Pt1: Middle Ear Infection Symptoms & Otitis Media Causes | Ruptured Eardrum Treatment By Hearing Solution Expert by Dr. Scott Young
