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Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

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Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#181
post #149
post #72

My son had adenoids removed last year because his hearing was VERY bad because of some kind of mucus blockage. Doctors explained to us that he would hear perfectly without the adenoids, because inner ear measurements were very good. So during the OP they cut away the adenoids, and made a hole into each eardrum, so fluids could exit. After the OP his hearing was so good that he told us not to scream at him when we bar…

So are his eustachian tubes chronically obstructed? My younger brother had chronic ear infections as a kid, and as best I know he basically had tubes in his eardrums for a while, and then when he was older his eustachian tubes started draining more reliabily. He's been fine since.

Docs did not tell me what exactly is obstructed - yes they said he might soon be fine without an operation because his head will grow.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 artific…

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.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge backstory, but there was a point when a lot of tiny problems that I had ignored for decades as "part of life", "stress", "everybody has small problems", "too much computer work" or attributed to external factors like "the cold viruses have gotten worse over the last twenty years" reached a crisis point in the form of problems with the digestive system so bad I had it checked out, from both above and f…

Which heavy metals did you test for? And what do you think was the source?

I had significant levels of mercury in hair but also in urine. That was a "fortunate" exception - with chronic poisoning you may end up - no, you usally do end up always testing with very low levels that don't raise any alarms.

Growing up as a child in East Germany we had lead pipes at home, but they had a thick layer of mineral build-up and even though I also heavily used DMSA, a prime chelator for lead, no significant amounts of lead ever showed up. Given that health came back - to levels not seen in decades - without us ever seeing much of lead, only mercury, I guess it must have been mostly mercury.

The only possible source is amalgam fillings in teeth, which I got in childhood in East Germany. I found a document that indicates that the kind of mixture they used there was different and was abandoned elsewhere long before, so that may be a contributing factor. Nevertheless, my jaw bones had lost their trabecular structure and were in a bad state in exactly the places where the amalgam fillings had been. This was found by the doctor who just wanted to do a regular injection into the buccal mucosa - and ended up deep inside the bone. Ooops, that's bad, he said. He injected DMPS, mercury chelator, and in the following months my jaw bones "came alive". In a positive sense. A year later he found the bone impenetrable everywhere he tried, it was penetrable by a simple needle without pressure in all four quadrants before that (I had had fillings in all quadrants, fortunately none very deep).

I also remembered that my East German dentist, after reunification asked me if she should replace some of the amalgam fillings with plastic fillings. I had no idea why and what and did not care, I always said "yes" to every suggestion a doctor ever made to me, I was completely unaware of any "amalgam controversy" until I had to do my desperate research of what was wrong with me. But now I remember that at exactly that time, just a year after I had started studying, I had suddenly and out of the blue developed severe, almost asthma-like allergy, had inexplicable problems in various joints, had terrible sleep issues, and a lot of other stuff. And I barely managed to pass the math classes (CS study) - I had always been a top math person and we had high-level math instruction at high-school (in year 3 of the CS study I discovered that the lecture was exactly about the same stuff that we had had in high-school from our over-achieving teacher). I had gotten "stupid", but I only realized it when everything cleared up under the chelation treatment and I've taken over 60 mostly STEM courses on Coursera and edX and now my brain works again. My dentist had removed the amalgam fillings with a normal drill and without any protection. When I did the research eight years ago even a fresh doctor in residency warned me not to have my remaining amalgam fillings removed - because of the danger of mercury being freed ("this is dangerous" was what she said), the drill creates vapor no matter how much water you use to cool it, and mercury vapor is the worst since it can penetrate all the surrounding tissues. When I had the remaining fillings removed it was done with special equipment and a chelating agent to wash the mouth after each removed filling.

There's a lot more - A LOT... after all, all those years of (essentially) experiments that hardly anyone ever performs. I've taken waaayyyy more chelators than even the doctors who think amalgam fillings cause poisoning and offer chelation treatments usually do, but since I have had success that could be clinically proven, and since I seem to be handling the whole thing very reasonably the doctor keeps filling my prescription. My conclusion, based on actual, sort of, "experiments" - on and off chelators, is that heavy metals have effects given FAR lower amounts than are clinically relevant today. I feel my conclusion is in line with science, given that we have reached the official conclusion for lead that the amount with zero effects is zero lead - and mercury is worse than lead (according to an NIH document I found). But you won't be able to detect those effects unless you try. The slow decline of health and mind is very subtle, I was "lucky" that I hit an extreme. I see soooo many people with issues I had, such as psoriasis, warts on the feet, colds that won't end, issues with eyes, etc. etc. - a looong list, that I have to wonder.... I DID take bio-chemistry, physiology, anatomy, etc etc. - at least a thousand ours of medical lectures and courses if not more over the last few years, so I am aware of the complexity. I just think that heavy metals contribute much more than is currently accepted. All you have to do to get (what I now think is) a significant amount of mercury is to eat lots of sea fish, especially the predators.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#185
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pre…

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.

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".

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#186
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, let's just put the children in pods with feeding tubes. Then they won't require any labor.

Don't forget the waste removal tubes, and for god's sake, don't mix the two up.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#187
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#188
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

You have a distorted view of the methods and procedures of "western" (evidence based) medicine. It is obviously not perfect (and I'm pretty sure that you don't actually know the worst of it - the current obsession with having universal prescriptive protocols for everything is a rather clear local minimum that medical practice is stuck into), but everything else generally doesn't rise above the "not even wrong" bar.

"Western" medicine dramatically improved in the last few decades. "Alternative" medicines do not have the intellectual framework or the ability to improve.

Re: Long-term health risks after having adenoids or tonsils removed in childhood

#190
I have to point out the obvious confounder here. The kids who get their tonsils and adenoids out are the ones with recurrent respiratory infections to begin with. Really the only way to control for this is to randomize kids to surgery or not and then follow for 20 years or more. This in contrast is an observational study, albeit with a very large number of subjects. They said they tried to control for confounding factors, but it's hard to see how effective that can be after the fact.
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