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Did you ever meet Draffin on your travels?

Draffin’s rods or bipods are a well-known ENT instrument. Before their invention in 1951, the attendant anaesthetist or nurse was obliged to support the mouthgag during tonsillectomy. Their originator, David Alexander Draffin (born in 1917 in Ballybey, Co Monaghan), was...

Plasticity with cochlear implants: individual factors in the outcomes

Andrej Kral gives us an overview of neuronal plasticity in congenital hearing loss, and discusses why it is core to our clinical interventions in hearing loss and rehabilitation. The brain is born immature and undergoes extensive shaping during early development....

Hearables: in-ear sensing devices for recording of physiological signals

Colver Ken Howe Ne, Jameel Muzaffar and Manohar Bance discuss the potential of hearable systems to monitor physiological signals (e.g. from brain or heart, blood pressure, body temperature) unobtrusively. Such adaptations require high-quality sensors and sophisticated de-noising signal processing on...

The Surgical Skills Centre in BACO 2018: pride of place

Simulation in medical training is gaining prominence with every passing year, and BACO will have a large space showcasing this area. We hear from the organisers. In recognition of the developing importance of simulation in surgical training, BACO 2018 has...

Are ENT patients who research their symptoms online better informed?

All our patients look up their symptoms online before they visit us, don’t they? And patients who do so are better informed than those who don’t, right? Well, that’s not actually the case… The ‘information era’ More information is now...

Looking at musculoskeletal disorders in audiology

Musculoskeletal disorders are one of the leading cause of sickness absence from work, work disability and loss of productivity across all European Union member states. Isla Beausire is a working audiologist with a personal and professional interest in this subject...

Harnessing head and neck cancer genomics for personalised medicine

Luc Morris updates us on the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment, which lies in “personalised oncology”, where specific molecular alterations of each tumour will be identified, and matched with actionable alterations in existing therapies, ushering in the era of...

Genomic testing for deafness and its implications

Gene therapies for hearing loss are rapidly advancing and will be transitioning to clinical practice. Here, the authors explain why clinicians involved in managing these disorders need to be aware of these advances. Genomic testing in England was significantly reconfigured...