RENÉE BACHER

The first few years of residency and practice can be a challenge for most otolaryngologists, but especially for those who are considering starting a family. Some have opted to pause trying to get pregnant, while others have started their families, but at a cost of time and resources. There are reasons why the decision on what to do is a vital one....

Despite what the American Medical Association has called an epidemic of physician burnout, some otolaryngologists aren’t emotionally or intellectually ready to retire at age 65, or even when it’s time for them to stop performing surgery. It can be incredibly difficult to make a decision about your future, regardless of whether that future is imminent or not.
ENTtoday spoke to several otolaryngologists who have pivoted away from surgery and are still working in their 70s...

When Gaelen Stanford-Moore, MD, MPhil, was an otolaryngology resident at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital administrators decided to make a change that would have had residents paying for overnight parking. Patients with airway emergencies, however, might suffer indirectly from this, and so resident union representatives, including Dr. Stanford-Moore, made hospital administrators aware...

There isn’t one educational degree or career path that prepares someone best to be a CLO. “Our clients might ask us to look for experience in an evolving organization, or in a company that has grown or pivoted, when we undertake these [L&D] leadership searches,” says Tory Clarke, founding partner of Bridge Partners, an executive search firm based in New York.

From tympanostomy tubes to balloon sinuplasty to olfactory training, new medical procedures and devices used in an otolaryngology practice are often created and developed by otolaryngologists themselves. How do these doctors-turned-inventors take an idea that may have occurred to them in the shower and turn it into something that improves or even saves lives? Often, the answer is an academic incubator.

Facial paralysis, whether it’s caused by a virus, tumor, trauma, or congenital abnormality, can be devastating to patients and significantly impact their quality of life. New and refined treatments and specialized facial nerve centers, however, can make a big difference in restoring smiles and more.

Balloon dilation originated in cardiac catheterization procedures and has become reasonably common in otolaryngology, most notably as balloon sinuplasty. Eustachian tube balloon dilation, however, is a more recent variant of the procedure that was approved for adults by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2016 and is currently performed only off label in children in the United States.

When you hit the weather just right, it’s difficult to keep the smile off your face just walking down the street in New Orleans. Magnolia blossoms the size of dinner plates perfume the air. Ornamental bird-of-paradise plants poke exotic orange and purple crowns out from garden beds. Buskers, or street performers, play better music than you might pay good money to hear at home. And there’s a festival every few days. Literally.

​​If you have a 20-something in your life, you may have heard of lucky girl syndrome, which has gone viral on TikTok. Content creators claim this “syndrome” is transforming their daily lives and bringing them good fortune. ​

Smartphones are well known for providing plentiful distractions, but otolaryngology residents, and even and those who have left their training days far behind, are using smartphone apps to navigate work/study life and make more efficient use of their time.

In the past, there was a stigma that locum tenens was for physicians who couldn’t get a “real job.” Doctors who did this temporary work may have been viewed as not being on top of their game, or they were retiring and on their way out. Not so anymore. According to the National Association of Locum Tenens Organizations (NALTO), every year about 52,000 locum tenens providers take care of more than 7.5 million Americans.

How the Polycystic Kidney Foundation is reaching out to underserved communities and addressing disparities.

Even for the top medical school students in the country, an otolaryngology residency is one of the most difficult specialties to land, and nearly 40% of applicants don’t match. Last year, 574 highly qualified applicants competed for one of 341 openings. That left 233 aspiring otolaryngologists without a residency in their chosen field. After four years of hard work and big student loans for many, what happens to these students?
“It’s an extremely challenging situation to work through, partly ...

“The show instilled in the public’s mind that paramedic programs needed educational and taxpayer support,” says emergency physician Ronald D. Stewart, MD, FACEP, who served as a consultant on the series and is a professor emeritus in emergency medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “When budgets came up, the thought of not funding an outreach program like a paramedic system became unacceptable to the public and any legislative body.”
According to Dr. Stewart, at the time “E...