People tend to go to alternate “healers” when they are really bad off, which is to say when symptoms are most intolerable. In the case of most self-limiting illnesses, this happens also to mean when they are getting ready to clear up. It’s called “regression to the mean.” Since the OP tolerated the stopped up ears for a while, and finally got desperate and went to the naturopath, this makes it all the more likely that something like the position or an instruction to open her mouth to try to equalize the pressure at the time of the shot-- or even doing so involuntarily if the shot hurt-- could have happened to work just at that moment.
“Regression to the mean” is one of the reasons that so many people believe in alternate healers and folk remedies.
I had something called “glue ear” as a child. It’s an infection of the fluid in the ear that makes it thick, and produced a sensation like your ear is plugged up. I needed to take antibiotics for it, but an ENT immediately relieved the plugged up feeling by using an instrument to puff air sharply into my nose. It was uncomfortable, but after a week of being stopped up, it was also a relief. When I was stopped up again, years later, I asked a doctor about that procedure, only to be told that it wasn’t done anymore, because it had been found to be not so safe-- sometimes the eardrum tore, and there were other, albeit slower, ways to relieve the stopped up feeling-- usually it went away by itself when the infection cleared up, it just meant tolerating it for a few more days.
Maybe what your doctor did is no longer practiced because it was found not to be safe. It may have been some combination of steroids and prescription decongestants that are no longer on the market. If it was that long ago, and is no longer done, it’s no longer taught, and this is why no one has heard of it.
That is how evidence-based medicine works-- it changes based on the most recent information.
Even if they were selfish and unwilling to share the knowledge in general, the doctors and their spouses and kids would never be sick if they knew of a easy, cheap cure. But most of people who know doctors socially will say they and their kids get colds and other viruses and end up suffering through them just like the rest of us.
But they’d want to share (sell) the treatments for viruses in general because they don’t have a money-making alternative to them. Antibiotics don’t work on viruses, so it’s mostly just “go home and rest and get plenty of liquids” - they aren’t getting kickbacks on that treatment, and the patient pays for the office visit either way.
(1) Person is sick
(2) Person takes purported remedy
(3) Person gets better
…it is generally virtually impossible to convince anybody without a solid grounding in the scientific method, and the reasons for it, that there is even a possibility that (2) and (3) are not causally connected. The person may grudgingly accept that (2) may not be a miracle cure for everyone, but will still generally insist that “it works for me”. The fact is, however, that the majority of afflictions get better without intervention. That’s why all pre-scientific societies have a vast array of folk remedies, only a tiny percentage of which have any non-placebo effect.
There’s a good explanation of this in R. Barker Bausell’s “Snake Oil Science”.
One cited example is arthritis (generally osteoarthritis), which is prone to irregularly cycling through periods of pain and remission. Whatever supplement or alternative intervention one uses during the worst pain is bound to be followed by relief (at least to some extent). The treatment gets the credit, even though relief was part of the natural course of the disease.
This also explains why there is so much woo used to treat other chronic disorders (like multiple sclerosis). Physicians can also fall into this error when prescribing interventions long thought to be useful but which actually are not.
The difference is that evidence-based medicine eventually discards its failures. Woo does not.
I honestly think in your situation that it was just a coincidence that it cleared up when it did. I mean, if you think about it there’s really no medications that I can even think of that are injected into the muscle that start working sooner than 10 minutes. That’s pretty much the onset time for injectable insulin, which needs to work as fast as possible. I get that you got relief at the same time he did whatever it was he did, but there’s no logical reason a single injection to your hip could not only work before it’s even fully injected but immediately clear up up congestion in your head. I still say it was the position he put you in that did it. As to why it’s not working this time, more than likely there’s other factors at play.
It was probably a combination of things: 1) It was going to clear up soon anyway (regression to the mean); 2) the position she was in; 3) a startle response to the shot that among other things made her mouth open; 4) the temperature in the room; 5) the power of suggestion; 6) the “medically” environment, particularly the smells; and finally, 7) whatever she was injected with, with the last maybe preventing her ears from stopping up again, but being the least of the factors that caused the immediate fix.
Apologies for the semi (or one-quarter) hijack… is that always the case?
A few years ago, I embarrassingly nearly passed out in a physician’s office as he began to show me the video of my colonoscopy. He injected me with something and I perked right up -within 30 seconds or so, not more than 10 minutes.
Regardless of the cause of my faint state (I thought it was probably because I walked around in the heat on an empty stomach following the “twilight” state they put you in for a colonoscopy; the doctor understandably thought I had too weak a stomach for the video of my innards), the shot SEEMED to take effect very quickly.
I have no idea what he shot me up with, or whether I snapped back to fully aware because of (a) the substance in the shot; or (b) my embarrassment at nearly fainting. But I’ve always assumed that (a) had at least something to do with it, and therefore that you can get a pretty quick reaction from certain shots.
Medically knowledgeable people, please comment as desired.
IANAD (I was a medical student for a long time, though), but your doctor may have administered an anticholinergic like Atropine. These do, indeed, work very fast.
I admit, IANAD lol but I was taught that the quickness of action for drugs has a lot to do with how it’s administered. From slowest to fastest would be oral, subcutaneous, intramuscular and intravenously. I know IV drugs can definitely work within seconds as we used them a lot for sedation before surgeries when I worked for a vet.