Treating Children with Homeopathic Medicines - Page 3

How do you treat fever in a child?

Most often, one needs to treat the parent's anxieties and fears more than the child's fever. The best way to treat these fears is with education about the wisdom of the body and about fever as an important defense. I say this because physicians and physiologists today recognize that fever is a useful response of the person's body to infection. While it is true that certain high or long-lasting fevers need to be treated or suppressed in some way, such fevers represent an extreme minority of fevers in children.

I am quite concerned about the overuse of conventional drugs to lower fevers. Homeopaths assert that we create a lot of chronic disease when we suppress acute illness.

I am often amazed at how well and how fast homeopathic medicines work in fevers. Because a fever is a defense, the body will make good use of additional tools that it is given to help in its defense. This is distinct from conventional drugs, especially anti-inflammatory drugs that ultimately are obstacles to the true cure.

I can and will refer the child for immediate medical treatment if fever is experienced in newborns (within first 4 months) that does not respond to homeopathic treatment within two hours, or if a fever in any child is over 40 degree Celsius and doesn't respond to home treatment after 6 hours, or if high fever in any child leads to great lethargy and neck stiffness.

Is it appropriate to use antibiotics in ear infections?

Antibiotics may have a place in treating ear infections but not necessarily as a treatment of first choice. The American Academy of Pediatrics' guidelines for the use of antibiotics in acute ear infections in children is actually that they should be avoided for the first three months. It may surprise some people to learn that a meta-analysis of the best studies on ear infection (British Medical Journal, 1997, 87:pp.466-74) found no benefit of using antibiotics as compared to placebo.

To make matters worse, some evidence suggests that administration of antibiotics lead to three times the number of ear infections as those children left untreated. Part of the problem with antibiotics is a basic premise of healing that is commonly ignored, that is, anytime you get something done for the body, the body doesn't learn to do it on its own as well.

In the U.S, it is too common that antibiotics are prescribed to newborns, even for simply having a reddened ear. The long-term consequences are unknown and scary. This over-prescribing of antibiotics for both newborns and any child is a part of what I call "medical child abuse." I look forward to the day that homeopathy gains more respect and is added into the medicine chest of more parents and doctors.