Search

Where ART meets Science: The Silence You Can Hear

Some moments have a sound you don’t hear with your ears but feel with your entire being. The artwork DS21008 (200 cm x 120 cm) captures such a moment: a Sunday morning in Maastricht, where the river Maas reflects the...

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...

Communicating with patients in 
‘Plain English’

Physicians have long been accused of using unnecessarily complicated language and impenetrable jargon as a way of maintaining their status, prestige and high earnings-potential, bamboozling the public and excluding them from meaningful discussion as part of what George Bernard Shaw...

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...

Coblation tongue channelling

After uvulopalatoplasty, the tendency is to focus on the tongue base as the next anatomical area to address in the management of snoring and sleep-disordered breathing. In this article, Glen Burgess describes the technique of tongue channelling, to reduce the...

Giacomo Puccini’s laryngeal cancer

Giacomo Puccini, one of the best known composers of all time, was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and died from the disease in 1924. In this article, Rosario Marchese-Ragona and Alessandro Martini describe Puccini’s experience of the disease with quotes from...

The role of objective measures and imaging to optimise cochlear implant outcomes

Should we be using new or novel objective measures and imaging to assist with our cochlear implant patients? Debi Vickers and Shak Saeed describe current clinical techniques and present advances that have the potential to optimise outcomes. Introduction It is...

Promoting human rights of deaf communities in low-resource settings

Stigma and misconceptions about deafness are serious impediments for many deaf people to realise rights and potential in some of the most challenging situations globally. Around 430 million people are estimated to live with moderate or higher levels of hearing...

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...

The outer ear in the visual arts

The ear is an exceptional organ, and quite rightly takes its place in the visual arts, as described by Albert Mudry, who takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the appearance of the ear and its depictions in art throughout...

Transoral endoscopic thyroidectomy / parathyroidectomy – a new approach

Historically, scarless surgery has been popular in certain cultures. But is it gaining traction around the world? A UK team tell us more. Background Alternative, remote access approaches to thyroidectomy and parathyroidectomy are increasing in popularity, the newest of these...