Otolaryngologist

Common misconception about tonsils. So tonsils are one of those things that you don't really need after age three. Your beta lymphocytes are produced by your tonsils up to age three. After that, your bone marrow kicks in and does the rest of the work. So some people think they should never have their tonsils out. But the truth of the matter is, sometimes they're needed and sometimes they're not. And if they're not needed, usually it's because either they're giving you chronic infections over and over and over again, or if they're causing obstruction, which causes sleep apnea, which causes a pressure on the heart and the lungs. And it's not good for development and, uh, physically and mentally in multiple different ways. So overall, talk to your primary care. If they have questions, they can always call us and, uh, yeah, we can take the tonsils out if need be.

Another misconception about ENTs is they don't do facial plastics. I'm actually certified facial plastics as well. That's part of my training. So a lot of dermatologists will send us different cancers around the ears, around the eye, around the nose and mouth. We do what's called a Mohs surgery. Dr. Mohs developed the surgery where it's a tissue preserving surgery. Instead of doing huge whacks of little cancers, we do just enough tissue to get it out. Well, we also do cervical, we do rotational flaps and bilobe flaps and different flaps to cover the defect. So when people send complex cancers that they don't want to deal with and leave funky scars, they send them to us and we make them closed. We get the tumor out, we close it, we make it look halfway decent.

There are several misconceptions in ENT regarding an otolaryngologist as far as what they do and then some of the things that we do. There's some misconceptions about that as well. I'll go generally first. So a lot of people think that ENTs just do tubes and tonsils and I'll go into that in just a second but otolaryngologists are kind of like the family practitioner of the surgical realm of the head. We don't do brains, we don't do eyes, we don't do spinal cords but we pretty much do everything else from cancer excision to ears to putting tubes in the ears to doing very micro the smallest surgery in the body to removing tongues, removing jaws, removing cancer from the neck, cancer from the parotid, parathyroidectomies, thyroidectomies to the drippy nose and we deal with all of that in a variation of conservative to surgical management.