ENT Emergencies

In an emergency, you rarely get one consistent piece of advice. You usually have two or three people with two or three different ideas. So you want to have your own set of thoughts - Rudy Giuliani

HWN Suggests

What will greet me this Christmas: ENT Emergencies

I’ve been told many times, “You’re doing ENT, that’s great. Early Nights and Tennis. Easy life with no emergencies, right?”. I’ve also been asked many times, “Is there such thing as an ENT emergency?”

Well, let me list some of the emergencies I’ve personally been involved with over the last few years. When I’m oncall for 10 days straight over the Christmas & New Year period, these are the emergencies that I will meet at odd hours of the night.

Post operative tonsillectomy bleed: a bleed from a branch of the high-pressure external carotid artery into the oral cavity and airway. Picture those horror movies where blood pours out of the nose and mouth. I have had to…

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Featured

How We Do It: A Portable ENT Tool Kit

In our experience, this method is efficient, economical and ensures that all the basic equipment needed to assess an ENT patient can be put together with ease.

Articles of Interest

Updates in ENT Emergencies: Tales from the Trenches

The following article is a review of four cases from the ENT teaching files of the Stroger Hospital of Cook County, Illinois. Each case discussion illustrates the new and old challenges of these ENT emergencies and provides new insights and reminders crucial to life-saving ED management.

Distinguishing Peritonsillar Abscess from Cellulitis

Consider a few caveats when approaching the diagnosis and treatment of peritonsillar abscess in the ED. It is generally accepted that ED treatment, drainage, and outpatient follow-up is safe and effective in the vast majority of patients.

Resources

Ear Nose & Throat Emergencies

Ear, nose and throat complaints are common presentations to ED, particularly in children, and will occupy a significant portion of your time in minors. There are also some true ENT emergencies that you need to recognise such as epiglottitis and epistaxis.

ENT emergencies

Synopsis fromICMteaching.com

ENT Emergencies Pearls, Pitfalls, Tips and Tricks

Dr. Leeor Sommer who runs ENT hands-on workshops and Dr. Maria Ivankovic, lecturer extraordinaire on ENT emergencies discuss ENT Emergencies Pearls, Pitfalls, Tips & Tricks...

Pediatric ENT Emergencies

Prior to any instrumentation, vasoconstriction of the mucosa and topical anesthesia should be used.

Pediatric Pearls

Brushing your teeth while riding a bike is rarely a good idea.

Epiglottitis

Before starting efforts at intubating any airway with laryngeal pathology, it must be appreciated by all caring for the patient that rescue ventilation may not work if the epiglottis or larynx is swollen or distorted. This applies to the LMA, King LT, and mask ventilation.

IntraNasal Analgesia

IntraNasal.net http://www.intranasal.net/Home/default.htm This web site offers health care and consumers information about nasal drug therapy: medical research, expert testimonial opinion and protocol suggestions. Major topics reviewed include intranasal midazolam for sedation and seizures, intranasal fentanyl and intranasal sufentanil for acute and chronic pain control, intranasal naloxone for opiate overdoses and intranasal glucagon for hypoglycemia.

Nose Foreign Body

The Katz Extractor oto-rhino foreign body remover is a small, lightweight, single use device for quick and easy extraction of foreign bodies from the nose or external ear canal.

Peritonsillar abscess drainage

This update reviews these tricks as well as some additional techniques for optimal success in draining a PTA, while avoiding the ultimate feared complication of puncturing the carotid artery.

Post-Tonsillectomy Hemorrhage

We know that all bleeding eventually stops: ideally, by means that we have imposed rather than by exhaustion of the patient’s RBC resources. We also know that the easiest, and often most efficacious, way to halt bleeding is to put some manual pressure on the source of bleeding. Well, that isn’t always so easy to accomplish. How do you put your finger on a bleeding tonsil?

Sphenopalatine Ganglion Nerve Blocks

SPG nerve blocks are a quick and non-invasive way to treat primary headaches that do not require IV placement. Such blocks may be a good option for patients who feature difficult IV access.3

Vertigo

Half Somersault Manuever - Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) frequently recurs after treatment, so a home exercise would be desirable. We designed a self-administered exercise, the half somersault, for home use. In this randomized single-blind study, we compare the efficacy of our exercise to self-administered Epley maneuvers in patients with BPPV.