[When external otitis does not heal]

An illness initially started as external otitis in a healthy and physically fit middle-aged person turned out to be a difficult-to-manage Langerhans cell histiocytosis. The disease occurs mostly in children, and international clinical guidelines have accordingly been devised mainly for juvenile patients. Treatment of adult patients is thus essentially empirical. The disease may affect several organs, as in our case report, in which the disease after progression to a multisystemic disease led to secondary leukemia and death of the patient.