dairy free for ear infections?

[*MamaJen*]

Has anybody had any luck reducing ear infections by going dairy free? DS and the babysitter's daughter, both 2, have had a string of ear infections. The babysitter and I are thinking about sort of joining forces and doing a dairy free trial.
I'm still considering tubes, but they'll have to wait at least a month anyway until my tax return comes in, so I'm willing to give dairy-free a trial while I wait.
I guess my two questions are, does it help, and how strict do you have to be. To see an improvement, would I have to remove all traces of casein, or would just cutting back on milk and cheese show an improvement? Would I still be able to use butter?

[Alyantavid]

You have to be very strict. For my kids, any amount of dairy affected them. And it's in everything, so you really have to read labels. In our case, after we'd eliminated it completely, we did find that whey doesn't bother them, just casein, so that helped a little.

With my kids, it helped a ton. My youngest got one ear infection after we removed dairy and started seeing a chiro. It went away on its own and he's never had one since.

[Koalamom]

Avoid it completely. I used to get ear infections all the time almost constant, but not anything terrible. Then I cut dairy out while nursing ds, and the infections went away. I had butter for the first time a few weeks ago and only a small amount of it and bam, I got am ear infection shortly after. Good thing is we are fine with ghee from grass fed cows.