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Ear wax: the good, the bad, and the ugly

With ear wax removal being a core part of ENT and audiology services, Seth Schwartz gives us his dos and don’ts. We have all seen cartoons where a character pulls enough wax out of their ears to make a candle....

The sound of music for adult cochlear implant recipients

Dr Valerie Looi has dedicated her academic career to investigating music perception in people who have cochlear implants, and more recently, the potential of music training for improving their music perception. This article outlines current research relating to music perception...

Lawrence Werth (19 October 1956 – 19 August 2014)

In August the audiology community was saddened to learn that Lawrence Werth (57), Chairman of PC Werth Ltd, London had passed away after a brave battle with skin cancer. A prolific contributor to this magazine over the years, he is...

Robotic head and neck surgery: current state of the art and future innovations

Technology and innovation has provided modern head and neck surgeons with successive generations of robotic surgical systems, fibre-optic lasers, and novel tools which have ushered in a new era of minimally invasive surgery for tumours of the pharynx and larynx....

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...

The power of mentoring

What is a mentor, and what are the benefits for mentee and mentor? Emma Stapleton and Rohma Abrar, mentor and mentee respectively, explain. The term ‘mentor’ is derived from Homer’s Odyssey, in which the goddess Athena, disguised as Mentor, guides...

Questionnaires to measure tinnitus severity

The handicap associated with tinnitus can arise from any combination of stress, anxiety, depression, emotional distress, insomnia, difficulties concentrating, or impairments in quality of life or everyday functioning. Measuring such handicap and determining clinical need is therefore far from trivial....

Selecting and optimising hearing aids for tinnitus benefit: a rough guide

Hearing aids have a relatively long history as tinnitus treatment tools. Saltzman and Ersner reported success in suppressing tinnitus with simple hearing aids in a number of cases as early as 1947 [1]. In an early comprehensive approach to tinnitus...

The role of significant others in hearing aid adoption

Presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, is one of the most common conditions affecting older adults and its prevalence is found to increase with age. Over the years, amplification technology has advanced significantly from analogue to digital signal processing. Despite this,...

A psychophysical perspective on single-sided deafness and its treatment by cochlear implants

Bob Carlyon gives us a psychophysical perspective on the hearing benefits that can and cannot be achieved for patients with single-sided deafness with a cochlear implant, and discusses some of the challenges in maximising the effectiveness of the treatment. He...