[blackhaz]

Thank you so much for posting this. Really, THANK YOU, kind stranger. Here in the Czech Republic we're always forced by doctors to do AE/TE to our son despite being mildly affected by strep as we are fighting PANDAS. The latest research converges on that AE/TE is not effective, and that we're doing the right thing by not doing the operation. It looks like doctors even in the most advanced medical institutions are blindly following old books here and still recommend to take the tonsils out at every occasion and eat bags of antibiotics "just for any case." The level of medicine here is so abysmal (except, probably, surgery) that we now have to rely mostly on our own heads and collect the latest research. Thank you.

[usaphp]

We went to a really good Ear nose throat doctor in San Diego hospital because our son had a long lasting runny nose, and they also told us to remove his tonsils and adenoids. I did not want to have them removed because of the involvement of sleep drugs necessary for operation, so we tried multiple ways to find the issue of the running nose, turned out it was something to do with the oil vaporizer they used in his preschool class, as soon as they removed it - his runny nose poeblem went away.

[what-the-grump]

Heh, you can do it the Russian way and yank them out while you are awake with just a topical, until your kid passes out from the pain :). That’s how my adenoids came out. Do not recommend.

[murph-almighty]

There's a scene in Roald Dahl's autobiography part one, Boy, that describes the process of getting his adenoids removed without anaesthesia. Sounded terrifying enough that I'm glad we knock people out for that sort of surgery.

[xchaotic]

I had mine removed with only mild anaesthetics and I still have nightmares about that. It also didn't help with various nose and throat infection at all. In fact I had pneumonia couple years later so not much respect for the butchers that did this to me.

[pavel_lishin]

I still have, let's call them interesting, memories of Soviet dental procedures. I think that if I were to put them on film, modern audiences would call them "torture porn".

[usaphp]

Hmm, my wife had them removed when she was a kid in Russia and says it was not that bad.

[cm2012]

People have wildly varying sensitivity to pain.

[John_KZ]

A lot of those ENT problems are related to allergies and irritants. The problem is that very often it's extremely hard to figure out what is causing the reaction and if it's an external element of the environment that can be modified. But the consensus of the medical community that formed in the last decade is that removing adenoids and tonsils should be a last-line of defense for chronic cases that affect your life significantly. That's because the solution is almost never permanent.

[arethuza]

I had years of doctors saying my nose and throat problems were caused by "allergies and irritants" - eventually one had a look up my nose and diagnosed a deviated septum (and my tonsils were already a mess).

NHS surgery to fix the deviated septum, whip out my tonsils and a couple of other things and I was much better - and that was nearly 30 years ago.

[testplzignore]

You've piqued my curiosity. Why would a preschool have an oil vaporizer?

[beauzero]

For smell. You can get Glade plugins or on the essential oils side a diffuser. We have used both in our family.

[coffeeacc]

Don't they also have female hormones in them?

[sandworm101]

Not female hormones per se, but things that are so similar as to have similar effects. This is not great for children, particularly developing boys. I've read some links between synthetic estrogen and changes in male behavior. I'd hate to think that a school might be naively using these things because they tend to calm boys down.

[bfuller]

Lavender oil can increase estrogen when used topically.

[goldenkey]

That is beyond retarded...and a school is supposed to instruct kids in the truthful ways of life? Spraying oil does NOT eliminate aromatic odor molecules. All it does is dilute their presence. In addition, all of these essential oils are from plants, which many people are randomly allergic or inflamed by. Essential oils are for a home. Spraying essential oils into public airspace is such a dick move. Sorry about your kid, sucks when people spray biologically active drugs into the air that other people have to breathe.

[winslett]

The school is looking forward to your job application to be a preschool teacher. You'll have the following benefits:

* $32k annual salary

You'll have the responsibility to take care of the most precious little things that have every walked the earth. Your management are the parents, or as they like to call themselves "the people who pay your salary". These management want you to know they would do nearly everything you attempt to do differently than you do it. They want you to know they would do it differently, but they would never actually do it.

You'll need to show up at 7:15am sharp. You'll be able to leave as soon as the last parent picks up their child, which is sometime around 6:15pm. We are happy to have you on the team.

Edit: in education, there is asymmetry of requirements (similar to the asymmetry of bullshit). The boots-on-the-ground educator has 70-years worth of legal duties to be performed. This educator is working with a wide variety of incoming supplies (i.e. the little humans). Additionally, nearly everyone thinks they are capable of being a teacher, and their own recommendations and their own requirements.

The flippant demand that we should prevent $3.50 Glade plugins in a classroom in the scope of all the other things that matter is asymmetrical bullshit. A kid had a runny nose. Medical advice was to remove tonsils. The parents pushed back and found the real problem.

Maybe the $3.50 Glade plugin covered for another kid who was being bullied because of body odor? Or, maybe it cut down on distractions from nearby human pollution odors? Perhaps, the preschool is the lowest cost preschool around because the parents are cheap and do not want to pay market-rate for childcare. Thus, to be able to break even, the preschool uses a building used has a mold and water problem.

Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors.

[merpnderp]

"Of all the things that can be improved with education in the US, we decide on an internet forum that a $3.50 Glade plugin is the root of all evil for education because it masks instead of removes odors."

You need to work on your straw man game. Start with something they actually said and work your way into something they didn't actually say. But just straight up putting fake words into their mouth is far too blatant.

[wolco]

This makes me think. Could there be an opportunity for remote babysitting or remote education for the earlier grades. We can elimate the not so qualified 32k person.

[wb36]

So sad but true

[dEnigma]

What does any of this have to do with forcing an oil vaporizer on everyone? Are you arguing that teachers need essential oils in the air to get through the day; or is this just about the fact, that parents always have different ideas? In that case you should still err on the side of not putting random substances in the air everyone at the school has to breathe.

[code_duck]

It would be better if most scent diffusers used essential oils, but unfortunately, most are made with VOCs and synthetic fragrance compounds that are known or suspected to cause many health problems, like Glade plugins. Febreze and Lysol are the same but with more VOCs.

I have severe sensitivity to fragrance and cannot tolerate synthetic fragrances, incense, or essential oils. Simply being near people who use artificial deodorant, shampoo, laundry detergent, dryer sheets or any other mainstream product that leaves them covered in synthetic fragrance is very uncomfortable. Essential oils are less problematic.

With essential oils, many of the chemicals present (such as linalool and d-limonene) break down as they oxidize after diffusion, and the oxidation products have different health effects than the original chemical, such as allergy sensitization and irritation.

My mother-in-law visited for two months, and left one of the rooms in my house saturated with Young Living essential oils from a diffuser. Six months later, I still can't go in there.

[evincarofautumn]

Same—I can’t tolerate most artificial fragrances, as they make my sinuses block up and irritate my eyes & skin. Sadly they’re everywhere—between perfumes, deodorants, lotions, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, air fresheners, odour removers, shampoos, body washes, hand soaps, household cleaners, &c., a lot of people and their homes are just covered in them.

I’ve been trying to figure out the specific compounds that give me trouble and why, but there are many, and for a lot of these products, it seems like the ingredients are rarely published in full—or they use obscured chemical names—I guess because companies have some right to maintain their “secret sauce”.

I’m not chemophobic in the slightest, but I have to wonder if this wild mix of VOCs is affecting people in ways that they just don’t notice because they don’t have any allergy or irritation—such as endocrine disruption. And it will be hard to pinpoint if they do cause health problems because there are so many different compounds and they’re so common and assumed safe.

[Arete31415]

Try running an ozone generator in there. It will break down the compounds much more quickly. The ozone itself breaks down pretty quickly, but don't run it when people or pets are in the house.

[coaxial]

> school is supposed to instruct kids in the truthful ways of life?

If only that was true...

[michaelg7x]

Cut carb intake right down and the levels of catarrh drop right off. Observational study in the 40's or 50's by a chap called Paton.

[pc86]

They already said it was due to an oil vaporizer, I don't think carbohydrates have anything to do with it.

[michaelg7x]

Ah, good point - I misread the comment. I would reassert, though: a HC diet can leave you prone to very snotty episodes, compared to the alternative ;)

It's been one of the two most obvious beneficial changes of my LCHF foray, the other being a substantial reduction in inflammation (and no longer suffering with chronic Achilles tendonitis). N=1, IANADr, etc.

[wolco]

Certain food can produce bateria that increases ones reactions. By cutting the carbs you may see other benefits.

[graycrow]

Can confirm that. Recently visited an otorhinolaryngologist with my 3 y.o. daughter having a blocked nose for too long after being sick, and the conversation started with typical "Why you even bothered to come here with such insignificant issue" and ended with "She have an enlarged adenoids, you need to remove them". And all of that been said only after short visual check of a crying child's nose. What you even able see there, with such tools and conditions? Of course I didn't trust the doctor at all, after that quick check-up and bold statements. And this is not a single doctor, after a many encounters with other doctors I can say that the whole health care system here, in the Czech Republic, is screwed up. Doctors are too ignorant and unprofessional to have so big self-confidence (often replaced by just being rude) as they have here.

[kingkawn]

Everything is based on population averages and fealty to academic research guidelines. But, like any population wide conclusions, it is a tricky move to apply them back to any given individual in the population.

[dandare]

From a personal experience, the public health care in Czech Republic is way much better than NHS or what you can afford as a middle-income family in US. The equation changes when you can afford private care.

[merpnderp]

A middle income family in the US usually has insurance that covers just about any specialist they want to see. MD Anderson, likely the best cancer institute in the world, accepts almost everyone's insurance (and also does about $100,000,000 of free work for those without).

The only people really limited in who they can see are those on public insurance like state coverage Medicaid for the poor or federal Medicare for the elderly. Those programs usually only pay a percentage of market value, and thus many doctors won't take them because they often lose money on the transaction.

[Tloewald]

As someone living in the US with far better medical coverage than average I am awestruck by how wrong this statement is. Have you ever had to deal with a serious illness in the US?

[merpnderp]

Yes, with several family members. With middling insurance in Oklahoma. I'm quite well versed in how Blue Cross Blue Shield's tiered policies work with several types of specialists. If you are awestruck, perhaps it is you who needs to learn a bit more.

[refurb]

What was exactly incorrect? I would agree that "you can see any specialist you want" is an exaggeration, but as someone with good insurance, I have about 100+ different ENTs in the bay area I could bring my daughter to, Stanford and UCSF included.

[gamblor956]

Most of America is not like the Bay Area with its overabundance of specialists.

There are many places in the US where the closest doctor is a few hundred miles away, and many more where the only doctors within a few hours are primary care physicians.

[mmt]

> many places in the US where the closest doctor is a few hundred miles away

Although this statement may be true, it may also be irrelevant if there are no people in those places. That said, I'm not just being pedantic: my point is that lack of availability is far more likely to be a result of low population density than of being in the US.

Moreover, your comment fails to respond to the original point, which is that of affordability/availability to families with middle income. Poverty combined with low population density would likely result in even less availability, but, then, poverty is incompatible with "middle income".

[neffy]

The NHS stopped the entire tonsil removal thing decades ago.

[saint_anton]

Not knowing what PANDAS is made for an interesting first read.

[headmelted]

You're right to be cautious and fact check everything you're told. I apologise if my response becomes overly ranty. This isn't to scare you, just to encourage you that you're doing the right thing by taking such an active role in your child's care.

I have views on this that would seem to most people to be seriously conflicted.

I'm militantly pro-science, and I argue constantly in the face of anti-science and pseudo-scientific bullshit anywhere I hear it. It makes me no fun at all at parties, and even some family members groan whenever someone brings up "alternative views" to the scientific consensus on much of anything as they know I'm about to start lecturing, whether it's climate change, vaccination, flat earth (<- seriously) or most of anything else.

On the other hand, my personal experiences of how medical science is applied locally by doctors and surgeons has made me entirely disillusioned with their whole industry, and I never trust anything I'm told without confirming it for myself.

To explain, I'm based in Northern Ireland, and a debate has gone on for a long time as to whether our National Health Service (NHS) is struggling or in trouble. In reality, it has already imploded.

This isn't hyperbole. Here's an exact quote from the BBC:

"Northern Ireland has some of the worst performance figures in the UK.

During the Christmas period, the number of patients seen in four hours in A&E departments dropped to 63%.

Exactly the same proportion started their cancer treatment within 62 days, according to the latest statistics, while the numbers waiting longer than they should for a routine operation have almost doubled in the past four years."

This hits home for me really hard. In the last six years my extended family has experienced:

- Two missed cancer diagnoses. - A potentially serious (and time-sensitive) diagnosis requiring specialist follow up that was missed on two seperate occasions. - Delayed treatments for potentially life-threatening cancer of over 100% of the recommended waiting period.

Our local hospital has become known as a place more likely to kill you than help you, due to how abysmal the standard of care is. Here's a link from a couple of months ago:

https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/03/15/news/pensioner-die...

Life threatening emergencies that arrive by ambulance are often left unattended for over four hours (this is recorded in the public record thanks to open data laws).

I sincerely hope the circumstances in the Czech Republic are better and that the doctors are much less overworked and much more capable of helping you, my intention here is just to give you encouragement that you're right in not just assuming that your child's in safe hands without you being involved.

[graycrow]

> I sincerely hope the circumstances in the Czech Republic are better and that the doctors are much less overworked and much more capable of helping you

I'm not an author of the parent comment, but i also live in the Czech Republic and can say that no, It's not any better. And based on a stories which my friends living in other countries telling me, I starting to suspect that the whole world health care system "made a wrong turn" some time ago. Looks like it's screwed everywhere, or at least for majority of the population.

[kome]

I am very happy about the professionalism and the humanity of Italian doctors and the Italian national healthcare service.

Of course there are problems, waiting lists, lack of funding. But damn, it's good and (mostly) free. I feel lucky.

Perhaps there are regional differences, but in my city, it's really good.

[ItsMe000001]

What do you base your judgment on? I think it heavily depends on what you needed services for thus far. I know people who thought just like you - until they themselves or a relative really needed them. Then they changed their opinion. But even then it depends on what exactly the issue is, I know at least one serious cancer case who got everything they could and then some for free - and they had money and shopped around, incl. specialists in the US checking out if it was worth going there for private consultations paid out of their own pocket, who told them they had top specialists right in front of them near where they lived (in Germany, a university clinic).

I think variance is big and individual examples are useless unless you have the exact same problem in the exact same locality as someone else. But I think it's safe to say that anything falling outside standardized diagnosis may not work out so great. I had to do my own research myself and beat a professor's (of medicine) prediction and amazed a few other doctors with "miracles", but I did not actually do anything special, just what I thought was kind of obvious after some research. When you fall into one of the many blind spots your experience will be bad, if you fall into one of the categories which are "standard" you'll probably be one of those people who are very satisfied by what the system provides.

One has to understand how doctors are trained and what the system they work in forces them to do (and what not to do). Once you understand that you may get more satisfaction. For example, doctors prefer treating immediate problems. If you come with a long and varied history, they don't have a time for that, and often they would not know what conclusions to draw anyway - the body is complex and even if they had a hunch, the more possibilities there are the harder it is to diagnose. Also, expectations of expectations: Doctors know (sometimes learned the hard way) that people expect miracles or at least solutions from them when in reality they themselves often don't know.

Finding the cause of a problem may take months or even years of commitment (in retrospect, after a diagnosis, it's always clear of course, "why didn't we think of that sooner"). Few patients have the resources, the patience(!) and will to slowly and iteratively work on a problem, especially when success is highly uncertain. I only solved the one I myself had because I took some very radical steps that set me back income-wise for a decade at least and cost me a few social connections. The majority of people would have gone with "placebos", symptom-covering "solutions" for immediate problems, instead of choosing the great uncertainty (and when I started it was very uncertain indeed and everybody advised me to be "reasonable" and not throw my life away to chase ghosts but listen to the doctors). If I was a doctor I would never treat someone like me - because it would be highly unlikely that the person would be as extreme as I was and give up so much of their current life for very uncertain future benefit. So what doctors offer also is a mirror of what patients expect and are willing to invest (and I don 't mean money, the time and effort under uncertainty is much harder to bear).

.

By the way, my tonsils disappeared by themselves! I went to nose and throat specialists a few times during the last decade because during my long recovery I had plenty of throat issues. At some point they wondered why my tonsils where so tiny, and during the last appointment last year or so I was asked when they had been removed - they weer gone. I never had surgery, and I'm sure I still had them a decade ago. No use asking, nobody knows what happened. They were definitely never removed (or the doctor three years ago would not still have found them to be unusually small, and the next one three years later that they were not there at all).

[kome]

> What do you base your judgment on?

The experience of various family members at different stage of their life (we had to deal with childbirth, cancers, complex surgeries, broken bones, and simply old age, etc) and my experience in living in different countries. I am happy of my city hospital.

[ItsMe000001]

> childbirth, cancers, complex surgeries, broken bones

That's all pretty standard, all of those I'd trust most modern hospitals with. Yes there can be big differences, but at least all of those are part of the standard things modern medicine excels at. Anything ER, surgery, child birth. Cancer treatment is more variable but there's standards, they know what the problem is, they know what to do for diagnosis, and treatment is pretty standardized and most variance is how much they are willing to experiment with the latest (and most expensive) treatments.

Try having anything that is systemic and not easy to see (or invisible to any biomedical imaging). Each time you have a clear diagnosis for which doctors can go to their catalog of appropriate treatments you are lucky. Anything obviously and visibly broken (incl. by using imaging tech) is "the easy stuff".

Your satisfaction also depends on how willing you are to accept whatever the doctors tell you!

If I had accepted the verdict some ten years ago I would never have found that there actually was a relatively easy to identify and treatable cause for my issues. If I had accepted the endocrinologist's recommendation for surgery to remove the nodule in my thyroid, and part of the enlarged thyroid too, I would have had a happy surgery experience, because they are good at hat. But I didn't - and the nodule disappeared and the thyroid shrank back to normal to the great amazement of the endocrinologist. I don't mean to criticize your assessment, I'm happy myself too - but I had to do all the heavy lifting myself, it's just that I know how to use "the system" and how to get what I want from it and not asking for things they are bad at delivering. If you always accept what they tell you psychologically you will be a satisfied customer and life is easy (even if the problems persist, but if you accept them as inevitable your mind learns to ignore them pretty well). If you don't know and never assume that things could be better you'll always give top-rates.

I was extremely satisfied (no exaggeration) and full of unshaken trust in all doctors for almost 40 years, and I had things like jaw surgery to correct an under-bite. I went into this surgery as if it was an appointment for a hair cut, they did not even give me anything to lower anxiety even though they had planned to - my trust was complete, and for things like surgery it still is. Only when I had a problem where there were symptoms but no known cause did I hit a wall and had a very rude awakening.

[dvtv75]

> By the way, my tonsils disappeared by themselves!

You're not alone there: my partner's tonsils "dissolved" when she was younger. I've never heard of this anywhere else until now.

[isolli]

I believe you find this article interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/upshot/labels-like-altern...

"My friends who believe in homeopathy don’t really care. Those who favor conventional medicine, though, can be just as blinded. Too often, when confronted with evidence that advanced technology might not be providing benefits, the medical community refuses to change its behavior."

He goes on to argue that the distinction between conventional and alternative medicine is misleading. The only distinction should be between what is proven and what is disproven.

[chrisbennet]

"By definition, Alternative Medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call Alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine." --Tim Minchin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk

[isolli]

And how would you call medicine that has been proven not to work? This is what the original discussion is about: the medical system can be too slow to recognize and stop harmful practices.

There are many examples: Thalidomide, operating on babies without anesthesia [0], intensive glucose control [1], adenoid removal (the topic here) etc.

[0] http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0810625

[gowld]

"Alternative" means "unproven or disproven", doesn't it?

[Chris_Jay]

To pro-alternative folks like myself it just means "not in the medical textbooks yet". Most 'alternative' approaches do have rigorous studies backing them up, just recent and ignored by a lot of people.

[frostburg]

Homeopathy doesn't work. Acupunture doesn't work. Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn't work. Faith healing doesn't work. These rigorous studies you're mentioning do not exist.

[isolli]

This meta-study supports the use of acupuncture to treat chronic pain: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

[mushtar]

What about getting allergy shots? Do you know that it was considered 'quack science' just as recently as a few decades ago? Now it's been adopted by mainstream medicine as one of the most effective ways to help deal with allergies.

Believe it or not, western medicine doesn't have all the answers, especially when it comes to chronic conditions. Thinking that steroids and antibiotics will cure IBS is quack science, and that's what's being practiced in western medicine.

[isolli]

I don't know, it's a matter of definition. What I know is that the article makes a good point.