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Commentary: dementia, hearing loss, and the danger of professional rabbit holes

The Lancet, a world-leading general medical journal, has a global impact. Its commissioned report into dementia prevention, intervention and care has been cited over 6000 times and has further been reviewed and updated in 2020 and now 2024. Here, Profs...

The pong of poverty: George Orwell on the problem of olfactory classism

Throughout his fiction and non-fiction, George Orwell incorporated references to olfaction to invoke strong reactions in his readers. For example, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the protagonist Winston describes “the pleasant smell of [Julia’s] hair”. Orwell emphasises the invasiveness and emotional force...

Entrepreneurial aspirations for the otolaryngologist

Entrepreneurship is a process of identifying an idea and starting a business venture with this idea. It requires generation of a business model or plan that emphasises the value proposition for the customer. The model must identify the partners, resources,...

American Thyroid Association Thyroid Cancer Management Guidelines: utilising risk stratification to optimise patient care

The steep rise in thyroid surgery around the globe, has led to the development of risk stratification to define the indications for surgery and the extent of surgery as well as adjuvant therapies for papillary carcinoma, to avoid over treatment....

The common frontal sinusotomy (Lothrop) and chronic rhinosinusitis

As our understanding of the pathophysiology of CRS evolves, so do our treatment strategies. It is accepted that in many cases, the main role of surgery is to allow better penetration of topical therapies to the sinus cavities. What, then,...

Optimising hearing aid processing for music appreciation

Hearing aid manufacturers’ main focus has, up until recently, been improvement of speech intelligibility. Today’s hearing aid users have much broader demands however and often cite improved music perception as a key outcome or goal. Drs Tish Ramirez and Rebecca...

The effects of leisure noise exposure on young people’s hearing

There is growing concern regarding the effects of leisure noise exposure on young people’s auditory system. Information provided by healthcare professionals should be evidence-based; Hannah Keppler discusses some recent findings about hearing in young people. Excessive noise exposure can lead...

Anaesthesia for free-flap surgery

Adel Hutchinson is one of those calm and controlled anaesthetists for whom nothing seems too difficult. In this article, she describes the key perioperative factors for one of the highest complexity operations in ENT; free-flap surgery. It makes good reading...

Sugammadex

Scott Russell is an anaesthetist with an almost unrivalled experience of complex head and neck surgery, and has seen all manner of new ideas come and go. However, in this article he describes a new pharmaceutical agent that is already...

Detecting cancer margins during robotic head and neck cancer surgery using ambient mass spectrometry

We have known about altered metabolism in cancer cells since Otto Warburg described it 97 years ago. But can we take advantage of this knowledge in curing cancer? Jim Higginson explains the value of smoke generated during cancer surgery. The...