Tips on Ear Care

In response to Fred’s bad experience with Mometamax and all of the follow-up comments on my post about it, Valerie has suggested that we might want to have a discussion of ear care. Goldens are notorious for their ear problems (and this has certainly held up in my experience with 3 of them!), and the class of drugs now used to treat wax buildup and inflammation appears to be causing deafness in an alarming number of dogs. My description of Fred’s ordeal and the similar ordeals of others are in the earlier post on this blog.

I have no special expertise in ear care, so I’m just going to start this off by noting what we are doing for Fred in hopes of preventing any recurrence of ear problems that might require Mometamax or one of the other deafness-inducing drugs. I hope that others will add helpful comments about good ear-care practices.

Two or three times a week, we swab Fred’s ears with Epi-Otic and then irrigate his ear canal with a quick squirt of the solution. We do this only if he is experiencing no unusual problems. It’s preventive. If Fred shows signs of ear trouble (he also has vestibular disease and a history of wax and yeast buildup), we take him to the vet before putting anything into his ears. You need to be certain that the eardrum is intact before irrigating with anything.

Signs of ear problems include head-shaking, ear-scratching, head-tilting, loss of coordination, eye- twitching, or jittery eye movements. The link Valerie posted in response to my Mometamax post has a good list of symptoms to watch for.