Why Do Allergy Skin Prick and Blood Testing Results Sometimes Differ?

Image by Wolfgang Ihloff in Wikipedia For inhalant allergies, there is a high agreement (~80-90%) in results found between skin prick and blood testing . However, occasionally the results may differ quite significantly... usually in these situations, the skin prick test comes back positive for something whereas the blood test comes back negative or normal. It's also possible that both skin prick and blood testing may come back normal even if a patient is truly allergic. Why? Bef…

5/26/2017 0

Continue Reading

Types of Ear Tubes

Ear tubes are placed whenever adequate ventilation of the middle ear is compromised and unresponsive to medications. Such situations include chronic ear infections , eustachian tube dysfunction , hearing loss due to fluid, etc. Once the decision is made to place an ear tube, the surgeon has many choices of ear tubes that could be placed. There are three main "classes" of ear tubes: grommet tubes (A), intermediate tubes (B), and T-tubes (C). When selecting what class of tube to pl…

6/06/2015 0

Continue Reading

Hearing the Same Sound at Different Pitches (Diplacusis)

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at  FreeDigitalPhotos.net One day, a musician patient presented to my clinic with a history of hearing the same pitch that sounded significantly differently between the ears. An A# sound in one ear sounded a half-tone lower in the other. This resulted in music sounding out-of-tune. This phenomenon is known as diplacusis and there are several different flavors. Diplacusis binauralis occurs when you hear the same sound differently in each ear. This conditio…

11/20/2014 0

Continue Reading

Another Reason to Stop Smoking... Decreased Sense of Taste

Greek researchers published a study in which they described a significant decrease in taste ability in smokers compared to non-smokers. In the study titled " Evaluation of young smokers and non-smokers with electrogustometry and contact endoscopy ," 62 male Greek soldiers were evaluated for smoking and taste by using two different instruments called electrogustometry (measures taste thresholds) and contact endoscopy (wich evaluated the morphology and density of papillae on the tongue…

8/24/2009 0

Continue Reading