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Telepractice in COVID-19 and beyond

COVID-19 has suddenly forced health professionals to switch from face-to-face to remote video conferencing to deliver many or most of their services. This article considers the current state of this service delivery model (also called telepractice) for speech and language...

Are quinsies worth draining?

Recent data is providing accumulating evidence that treatment failure in the management of peritonsillar abscesses (PTAs, aka ‘quinsies’) is similar when these are managed with medical treatment (MT) alone versus MT plus surgical drainage (M+ST). However, in the absence of...

Choosing our tools: assessing language in dementia

Language led dementia, also known as primary progressive aphasia (PPA), is an emerging area of practice in speech and language therapy. Given that the diagnosis centres around the key diagnostic feature of language, whereby language impairment is the most prominent...

Are there benefits of prophylactic swallowing exercises for patients with head and neck cancer?

This randomised controlled trial aimed to establish the impact of prophylactic swallowing exercises in patients undergoing chemoradiation therapy for head and neck cancer. The primary outcome was the functional oral intake scale (FOIS), although secondary measures for feeding tube use,...

Anticoagulated patients and epistaxis

This systematic review looks at the increasing complexity in this space as anti-thrombotics become more sophisticated and move away from the more well understood management of warfarinised patients. After a thorough search, 29 papers were found to be relevant and...

Persistent dysphonia due to cricothyroid muscle dystonia – should we be requesting laryngeal EMGs for non-resolving ‘functional’ dysphonia?

This article is an interesting report of a case of persistent voice problems affecting a 43-year-old physician that significantly compromised her ability to converse and communicate at work. Specifically, she had a fluctuating voice quality that would ‘choke off’, combined...

Intratympanic steroids - to give or not to give?

The treatment of idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSNHL) is controversial and different modes of steroids have been tried without any universal consensus. Various authors have reported combined oral and intratympanic steroid therapy in SSNHL, with consistent results in several...

Updates on current evidence for biologics in chronic rhinosinusitis

For a comparatively short piece, this article manages to pack in a lot of important information about a complex emerging area of rhinology – immunologically targeted therapy (biologics). Immunologically targeted therapy is a rapidly progressing and expanding domain which is...

Olfactory function and vitamin D

This Turkish prospective study evaluated olfactory function in individuals with primary vitamin D deficiency and the effect of replacement therapy on olfactory function over an eight-month period in 2019. A total of 91 individuals with vitamin D insufficiency were included,...

Biologics for deafness

Cochlear implants and hearing aids are inherently limited in their ability to restore ‘natural’ hearing. Biological therapy to treat inner ear pathology still is evolving rapidly with several ongoing clinical trials, though none are available for clinical practice to date....

Concussion and vestibular processing deficits

It is well known that patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), also referred to as concussion, display longstanding vestibular symptoms but often clinical signs and objective vestibular function test abnormalities are lacking. The aim of the study was to...