Doctor Column

A sore throat can be more than a throat that hurts. It can vary from mild to severe, from viral to bacterial and the consequences range from insignificant to life changing. Testing for strep can make all the difference.

Medical advances over the past several decades have been remarkable. In the mid 1980’s, a revolution changed the way surgeons treated sinus disease. At that time, it was common practice to cut the skin of the face or the tissue above the upper teeth to gain access to sinus disease. That method has given way with few exceptions to “FESS.”

There has been a slight uptick in telemedicine adoption in 2015 among healthcare providers, according to an updated telemedicine study from HIMSS Analytics.

Nine year old little Billy has a runny nose, is coughing and complains that he can’t breathe through the nose. Is it a cold, his allergies, infected adenoids or sinusitis? How should it be treated?

When Sonya Shakir’s 12-year-old son Charles developed a raging earache just before bedtime last winter, she decided to bypass the emergency room and head to a community center on Cleveland’s East Side. Within 15 minutes of arriving, Charles was lying in a high-tech pod equipped with a wireless stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer and other medical instruments, watching his mother chat by video with a doctor in a hospital several miles away.

Both drugs and nutritional supplements have long been used to improve health and the quality of life. But the traditional delivery of these products—normally in the form or tablets or injectables—can be very difficult and inconvenient for many people. The practice of drug delivery has changed dramatically in the last few decades and even greater changes are anticipated in the near future. Biomedical engineers are exploring and doing excellent research.

We are now dealing with an epidemic worldwide problem of metabolic problems such as diabetes mellitus and high cholesterol. At the same time, we are facing a signficant concern about cardiovascular diseases such as coronary artery disease and hypertension. We have learned a lot about these disorders and we have several good therapies available.

For some, the difficulty is severe enough that it prevents them from using pills altogether, which can be problematic if you’re interested in supporting your health with supplements or in the cases where medications are truly necessary.

Sinusitis is almost always preceded by rhinitis, the common cold. Hundreds of cold viruses provoke symptoms of runny nose, sneezing, sore throats and coughing in people. Rhinitis is usually afebrile, of limited duration and antibiotics are of no value in its treatment.

Rhinosinusitis is an infection or inflammation of the nose and sinus. Since the introduction of antibiotics, the incidence of rhinosinusitis has decreased dramatically over the years. With the abuse of antibiotics, using them in cases where they are not indicated, there has been an alarming increase in the appearance of superbugs. The antibiotics that once worked against bacteria of certain infectious diseases no longer work against these superbugs.