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Neurological idiopathic disease: a shared journey for NASA and medicine

Whilst Southampton can’t really be described as an extreme environment, experiments carried out in the city have certainly been taken out of this world. Robert Marchbanks discusses one of the associations between Southampton, The International Space Station and tympanic membrane...

Sniffing out the evidence – COVID-19 and loss of sense of smell and taste

Louis Pasteur once observed: “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” Professor Hopkins was certainly prepared when a few anecdotes of smell problems started to accumulate early in the pandemic’s course. Post-viral olfactory loss is nothing...

By the people, for the people: a multidisciplinary facial nerve clinic with a difference

Facial nerve palsy is regularly seen in ENT clinics. Underlying diagnoses are excluded, and the patient is often then discharged to ‘see how it goes’, with or without an ophthalmology referral. Here, Catherine Meller describes how she and her team...

Surgical technology and operating room safety failures: lessons from vascular and general surgery

Background – surgical technology and otolaryngology An estimated 234 million major surgical procedures are performed annually worldwide. This requires the interaction of multidisciplinary teams with varying contributions of surgical technology and therefore makes surgical procedures prone to multiple sources of...

The workplace environment and doctors’ health (ENT)

It is well established that doctors have higher levels of stress, depression and suicide than the general population [1] and most other professional groups (Figure 1 illustrates the factors that can make us ill). In addition they have high levels...

Developing medical devices for children: opportunities and challenges

The development of medical devices for infants and children lags significantly behind the development of devices for adults. While in the United States the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set up incentives for developing child age-specific pharmaceuticals, there is...

Auditory brainstem implant results in adults and children

Background The auditory brainstem implant (ABI) has been developed from cochlear implant (CI) technology and is indicated for people who have anatomical abnormalities of the cochlea or dysfunction of the auditory nerve. The majority of people who have received an...