The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #191: Jenni's 18 Month Ear Infection!
"Doctors prescribe medicines they know little about to cure diseases they know less about in human beings they know nothing about." This striking quote drives our latest exploration of how the modern medical system frequently misses the mark in treating chronic conditions.
We pull back the curtain on the profit-driven approach of Western medicine where "a patient cured is a customer lost," resulting in treatment plans that address symptoms while ignoring root causes. Jenni shares her harrowing personal experience with an ENT who prescribed medications that drastically worsened her ear infection, causing her ear canal to swell shut and triggering severe systemic symptoms. What started as a routine visit for a chronic ear issue escalated into a medical emergency when conventional treatment backfired spectacularly.
The misdiagnosis of her condition highlights a critical truth we've observed repeatedly: chronic conditions like eczema, psoriasis, and inflammatory responses originate in gut health. While Western medicine excels at acute care, it ranks dead last globally in addressing chronic health issues. Instead of endless prescriptions and topical treatments that require lifetime use, we advocate identifying food sensitivities, implementing gut-healing protocols with compounds like glutamine and butyrate, and addressing the true source of inflammation.
Jenni's story also reveals the frustrating inefficiencies of healthcare delivery—from medications that were never called in to dismissive responses from medical staff when seeking urgent help. These experiences reinforce our core message: you must be your own health advocate. Question treatments that only address surface issues, recognize when conventional wisdom fails to see your body as an interconnected system, and know when to seek alternatives.
Take control of your health journey by learning to treat problems, not symptoms. Subscribe to The Berman Method for more insights on addressing the root causes of chronic health issues and achieving lasting wellness.
This is the Berman Method podcast, featuring Dr Jake Berman and physician assistant Jenny Berman. We are here to treat problems and not symptoms. Disclaimer this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and not to treat anyone or to give medical advice. If you are interested in any information that we are giving and would like to use this for yourself, we recommend that you contact your primary care physician or reach out to us and ask us questions about yourself specifically. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:And we are rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling on the Berman Method podcast, focused on treating problems and not symptoms. Dr Jake Berman, here with my beautiful co-host.
Speaker 1:Jenny Berman, physician assistant.
Speaker 2:We are solo.
Speaker 1:Walker's sleeping. Yeah, Walker's snoozing.
Speaker 2:Snug as a bug in a rug. So here we are we get to rant, I get to rant uninterrupted, so I don't have to worry about waking up a sleeping baby.
Speaker 1:Oh boy.
Speaker 2:Here we go. So, David, going against Goliath, Goliath being the corporate medical system, big pharma, your health insurance companies. They do not have your best interests in mind. They will choose profits over patient outcomes every single time. And it's not their fault, patient outcomes every single time. And it's not their fault, really, because they're businesses. They have to run it like a business and curing you is a patient loss. So a patient cured is a customer loss. So I got this text from one of my buddies, one of my good buddies, last week, and he goes. I feel like this every time I walk into a doctor's office. So this is a good one. Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little to cure diseases which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing.
Speaker 1:That kind of sounds like my ENT journey I've been going through.
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh To a T. You're living this right now, dealing with this ENT. It's such a joke, so let me read it again. Doctors are men or women who prescribe medicines of which they know very little to cure diseases which they know even less of in human beings, of whom they know nothing about. I mean, think about that for a minute. That is Western medicine. To a T, I mean, it's just a joke, an absolute joke. Some pharmaceutical rep shows up at the office and tries to schmooze the doctor and says that you're going to get this kickback for prescribing this medication and the doctor says sure, insurance reimbursements continues to go down, so I've got to make ends meet, I got to make the money, so sure I'll prescribe it. I don't know anything about this medication and I don't even know anything about the patient, but I'll write the script.
Speaker 1:Right, right, that's exactly it, just here. Here's your pill or your cream or your ointment. Get out, see you in a couple months. Hope you feel better.
Speaker 2:Insane, absolutely insane One last time. Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of which they know even less, in human beings that they know nothing about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why don't we tell a little bit more about my ENT story to go along with this? Because we are. I'm living it and I keep saying why, like what's? No, no, I'm not going back. And we talked a little bit about it on last week's episode. So, if you missed it, I repeated my food sensitivity testing last week cause I've been having some various autoimmune type responses, conditions, symptoms, so I decided to repeat my food sensitivity testing.
Speaker 1:To recap just a little bit, when I went to the ENT the first time, I've been having this off and on like chronic left ear infection, but then I also started having some throat and swallowing issues. So I actually went to the ENT just to make sure I wasn't missing something that I can't see. I can't look in my own ear, even though I kept having Jake use my otoscope and try to look in my ear and I'm showing him Google pictures of this is normal. This is not normal. Look for this. Having him be the eye to actually look in my own ear, since I couldn't and same thing with my throat Really just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something that can't be seen from the human eye on the outside.
Speaker 1:So I go to the ENT and of course I walk out of there with three prescriptions at my pharmacy and of course I'm like I did tell them I'm five months postpartum, I'm nursing and they're still prescribing me prescription medication. So here they are again, knowing nothing about me as an individual. But I also walked out with the three scripts saying and I told you I'm not going to fill any of them because it's all sounds like it's something that can be treated from my gut. So I really need to get my sensitivities back and get my blood testing results back and really work at this like I would any of my other patients. I now know it's non-acute infection and it's not a tumor. So now I can treat this from my gut.
Speaker 2:You ruled out the bad stuff, right.
Speaker 1:So here I am. Things get a little worse. So I decided to use one of the creams that the doctor prescribed inside my ear just to see if I could get things under control enough to where then I could treat from my gut, because I know the gut's going to take time. So can I get it under control, treat from the gut and then be able to maintain it with a healthy gut? I used the cream for 36 hours yeah, if even and got 100%, significantly worse, worse, 150% worse. I mean it was drastic, worse, to the point that we're reaching out to our friend who's a physician, talking with him and he's like you need to go to the ER. It was significant symptoms. So of course, me here I am self-treating again started myself on a different treatment plan and decided that I would just wait it out and continue to treat appropriately.
Speaker 1:Few days later I follow up with the ENT. First of all, I should back up and say when the symptoms significantly worsened in the first 36 hours, I called the doctor on first thing, monday morning, 8 am, was told I would get a call back by the end of the day on Monday, even though I told them this is significantly worse. This is bad. I'd like to have a treatment plan. I did not get a call back for 48 hours. I did not get a call back till Wednesday morning and by this time I had already decided that I was going to go on my own treatment plan within that time period, since I didn't get a call back. Long story short 48 hours later they call me back, they schedule me, I go back to the doctor again and here we are wanting to prescribe yet another prescription medication and a long-term treatment oil that I can use long-term, like it's safe to use every day. Just use it.
Speaker 2:For the rest of your life, for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:It'll keep it under control. And I'm like, I'm still nursing, like every medication or oil or topical or whatever that I'm putting in and on my body is also affecting the gut of this little human being that I'm nursing, but yet the doctor knows nothing about me. So why does he care about that? So this just explains.
Speaker 2:And to give a little more details. When you started using that cream and things got exponentially worse, this is when we actually got concerned and we're like okay, maybe this isn't a gut issue, Maybe this is a tumor, Maybe this is cancer, Maybe this is an infection of your cheekbone which the only option is surgery or I forget what it was, so I'm paraphrasing your world.
Speaker 2:So that's when I called my buddy, who's an ER physician. I'm like, dude, help us troubleshoot this. We don't have a good differential. That's not cancer right now. Differential diagnosis is just another way of saying if it's not cancer, what else could it be? So we tell him the symptoms, the current symptoms, and he goes dude, you got to go get a CT scan now because it could be. What was the scary thing that he was saying?
Speaker 1:Malignant otitis externa which is a pseudomonas infection.
Speaker 2:I'm like what the hell is that?
Speaker 1:As we're driving to Orlando for our CEO meeting. Right, we're like driving to a different city for a two-day business meeting where we will have no breaks to do anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and icing on the cake, we're leaving for Jamaica five days later. So it's like what in the world is happening right now. But this is a perfect example. Treating the symptoms caused the symptoms to get exponentially worse, which made it present like it was something horrifically worse than what it actually is.
Speaker 1:And it ended up. If anybody cares, it ended up being a middle and outer ear infection, up being a middle and outer ear infection, but the steroidal fungal cream that they gave me triggered the infection to worsen significantly, like my ear swelled shut. Have you ever seen anyone's ear swell shut?
Speaker 2:That was crazy. You could visibly see her ear and I'm going oh my gosh, that is horrible.
Speaker 1:The canal of my ear swelled closed. I couldn't eat, I couldn't chew.
Speaker 2:Couldn't hear I couldn't hear.
Speaker 1:I mean, I could hear on my right ear, not my left ear. So yeah, it was just. You know, one of these things where we keep saying treating symptoms is not going to fix a problem. And obviously it didn't. It made the problem worse.
Speaker 2:Wasn't the official diagnosis chronic eczema of the middle and outer ear.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's what they're trying to tell me that I had chronic eczema which then created a bacterial infection. So they initially told me it was fungal and wanted to treat the fungus, which made things significantly worse, like we've said. So now they're trying to say that it's chronic eczema that stimulated a bacterial infection of the middle and outer ear. So, and if it is eczema I've had seborrheic dermatitis in my life, I've had eczema in my life it's totally a gut issue. I cured it the first time by figuring out my food sensitivities and eliminating and healing the gut. Lining and sensitivities change, just like we talked about last time. Sensitivities in the microbiome, the environment of the gut changes and certainly after having three babies and three C-sections and four miscarriages, mine has probably changed and it definitely has. I did my sensitivities and there's lots of new stuff on there. So now I'm kind of back to that gut healing process to heal the eczema. That could be a stimulating effect to this ear issue, but nonetheless it definitely progressed into something worse.
Speaker 2:I think that we need to take a step back and look at this thing from a fifth grade reading level, because we've got multiple episodes. I think we're 190 episodes into this thing now. We've got multiple over the years talking about explicitly saying that eczema is directly the result of gut health, poor gut health.
Speaker 1:Even in babies. So all of you moms and dads out there listening with your babies that have eczema behind their knees and behind their elbows and in their diaper region cracks, it's their gut yeah, it's the gut.
Speaker 2:So now we finally got a diagnosis of chronic eczema of the ear here. Take this steroid, take this prescription medication, this pharmaceutical, this chemically composed drug, and treat the symptom in your ear, where actually the problem is down two and a half feet lower in your gut.
Speaker 1:It's like wait a second and that's for eczema anywhere. They want to give you these creams and oils and shampoos to use that you have to use for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2:And somewhere around 12 to 18 months you'll start to see relief.
Speaker 1:And then once you see relief, you got to keep going. You can't stop it, or we can just figure out the food sensitivity. Add some glutamine for some gut healing process, some butyrate. Allow the gut to heal, get your blood sugar and your cortisol under control. It's not easy, but it's simple.
Speaker 2:It's not simple.
Speaker 1:It's easy, whatever? No, it's not easy, it is simple.
Speaker 2:It's not easy. It is simple and it's not fast. It's not easy and it's not fast to do it. The right way and this is the thing that we've got to note on this thing is your ENT is not being malicious. The doctor's not trying to do bad. This is just the world that they are in. Western medicine has succumbed to this where it's like you got to be kidding me. This is a chronic thing. You've had this ear issue for 18 months.
Speaker 1:On and off. Yeah Well, until this point where it got so much worse, but yeah 18 months.
Speaker 2:We missed that piece or maybe the ante missed that piece where this is where Western medicine falls short compared to Eastern medicine. You know Eastern medicine has 5,000 years of experience with chronic conditions. Western medicine we've only been doing this for less than 200 years and our ability to treat chronic issues is horrible. It's zero. I think I mentioned one of the stats last episode. We are the last in the entire world in our ability to treat chronic infection, chronic disease. I mean we're talking about third world countries to do it better than us.
Speaker 1:This is insane. Well, and third world countries also don't have the amount of processed food that we have in our country. That plays a role, but we don't need to get on that topic anyway. You know, the icing on the cake was when I did figure out again that this was now a bacterial infection and I actually did need there's nothing I shouldn't say there's nothing more. In certain instances we need prescription medications. Right, with this bacterial infection, I needed a prescription medication to so that it didn't progress and I didn't become septic. That's a reason definitely to take a prescription. So they they allegedly called in my prescription but didn't call in my prescription and I couldn't pick it up on Friday.
Speaker 2:Holy cow I mean. But wait, there's more to this story. It just goes on and on and on. So we got an emergency appointment at nine o'clock you did 9am Friday morning and the doctor explicitly says to the scribe sitting right there calling this script to the clinic right across the street from our office, and it'll be ready in five minutes. 3.30 rolls around and I get done golfing with one of my clients and you're like no, they never called it in to the place.
Speaker 1:The pharmacy never received the script.
Speaker 2:And I'm like this isiday afternoon at 3 30, so now you have to suffer for 72 more hours until monday so I call the office and the office closes at three.
Speaker 1:The on-call answers and says that, or the answering service answers and says that they don't take urgent messages regarding prescriptions so here word for word, that's what he said, yeah we do not take urgent requests regarding prescriptions. So here I am friday afternoon without my antibiotic with a significant bacterial infection and the guy that answered the phone he goes.
Speaker 1:You know, to be honest, this isn't the first time this has happened either right, so it's like what the f is going on here, but that's, that's medicine, and it just it like I'm appalled, right, because I would never, this situation would have never happened to one of my own clients like that's not how I handle situations for my clients, so I was just, as a provider, appalled. But anyway, this isn't even what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2:And it's not going to happen. We're trying to get ahead of our recordings right now. So by the time you listen to this episode, we will have gotten back from Jamaica, our annual trip to Jamaica, ocho Rios. So we're really excited about this. Or happy Memorial Day. I think you're trying to strategically force me to do the Murph exercise while we're over there in Ocho Rios, which you know, what better day to do the Murph than the last day of our five day vacation vacation in Jamaica? I just can't imagine a better time that my body is going to be physically ready, mentally willing and able to do this torturous exercise.
Speaker 1:Your aura ring's going to be like Jake today is the day for you to get up and complete the Murph and be so proud of yourself. You have all the power in the world to do it today. That's what it's going to tell you.
Speaker 2:What is the MRF?
Speaker 1:One mile run, oh no. What's first? 100 pull-ups, 200. Oh no.
Speaker 2:I thought you'd start with a mile run.
Speaker 1:You do A mile run 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats. And then another mile run yeah, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats.
Speaker 2:And then another mile run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you start with a mile.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and this is all for time, but we've done it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, we've done it.
Speaker 1:This will be my fourth year. I think it's only going to be your second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm really looking forward to this.
Speaker 1:Are you going to bring your 14-pound weighted vest to wear while you do it?
Speaker 2:I actually already asked Mr Bezos to ship one to Moon Palace down there, so it should be waiting, because I know that we don't have the room in our suitcase the way that we have to pack for five.
Speaker 1:Yeah, five. Everybody should try the Murph. Use a band for your pull-ups, or maybe use a little like the TRX straps and do, hanging on the TRX straps, do your pushups on your knees or maybe even on the wall. The squats up and down from a chair. You already do 100 squats a day anyway.
Speaker 2:You do.
Speaker 1:Up and down, off the chair, off the commode, out of the car 100?. You should 30?. So you can do your squats to a chair, up and down, controlled, and you can walk the mile or jog or run or bike. Even if you bike the mile, that's not that far, so everybody should try it with us.
Speaker 2:What time did you get? Last year we were in Key West.
Speaker 1:last year I was also 13 weeks pregnant last year when we did it, so I was 13 weeks pregnant in Key West and I think I did it in 36 minutes.
Speaker 2:What did I do it in 66?
Speaker 1:I don't think I wrote yours down. Did you write it down? Check your notes? You should have. I think my best is 34 minutes. That's what I'm going for this year.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, if you guys don't hear another podcast recording, it's because I didn't survive.
Speaker 1:Because you didn't make it. I didn't Ooh 3303 is my best, so I'm going to do it in under 33 minutes.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:Alright. So, everybody, the point of this podcast was to say that you should always be your own self-advocate. Dig deeper. Sometimes antibiotics are necessary and it's okay as long as you're treating your gut appropriately. Chronic conditions like eczema and psoriasis are coming from your gut 100% of the time. Yes. So stop taking Rynboke and Otesla, which are causing damage to your cells, and instead treat your gut. And then go do the MRF on Memorial Day.
Speaker 2:Or this is already going to be out, so do the MRF now. Yeah, do it this week.
Speaker 1:You can celebrate America a day late.
Speaker 2:Yes, not America.
Speaker 1:America's fallen heroes. The fallen heroes, yes.
Speaker 2:So thank you to all of our veterans that risked it all, in extreme gratitude to the ones that didn't make it back, because that's what Memorial Day is all about the ones that didn't make it back. And their families, yeah, their families and go Team America, yeah you haven't said that in a while, Like yeah, what the hell, man?
Speaker 2:If you don't like America, get the F out. I'm sick and tired of all this bitching and moaning and these pansy asses getting really 10 foot tall and bulletproof behind the keyboard. If you don't like America, get the F out. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Team America. Hoorah, there's the Vens that he wanted. Ciao for now. Thank you for subscribing on your social media and podcast platforms to the Berman Method Dr Jake Berman with Berman Physical Therapy and Jenny Berman, Physician Assistant with Berman Health and Wellness. You can find more information on our website wwwbermanptcom for physical therapy. Wwwbermanptcom forward slash wellness for the health and wellness. You can also find us on social media, Facebook, Instagram and on your podcast platform, so be sure to follow us, like us, subscribe to us and, if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. You may also find our free reports on the websites as well, where you can download this free information for yourself. Have a great day.