Word: eustachian
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...BINKIES Researchers have found that heavy pacifier use by infants older than six months increases the risk of ear infections--the most common reason for childhood visits to the doctor. The constant sucking can cause harm to the Eustachian tube, making it more difficult for the middle ear to drain. Nurses involved in the study suggest parents take pacifiers away during playtime and allow toddlers to use them only when falling asleep...
...pressure of 14.7 p.s.i., the astronauts protected their ears by removing their helmets and performing the "Valsalva maneuver" (named for its inventor, the 18th century Italian anatomist Antonio Valsalva). Holding their noses, closing their mouths and trying vigorously to exhale through their nostrils, they forced air through their clogged Eustachian tubes to keep the pressure in their middle ears equal to the increasing cabin pressure. The tactic worked perfectly, preventing pain and possible rupture of their eardrums...
...devised the decompression tables on which all diving practice has been based ever since, his father put young J.B.S. into a diving suit and dropped him into 40 feet of water. It was a quick but effective lesson for the boy; it taught him how to keep his Eustachian tubes open...
Jacoba ("Joke") Haanschoten, 5, a child of a Putten factory worker, had enlarged and infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube. Such blockage could, in turn, cause infection of the middle ear. A fortnight ago Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) went to Utrecht's City and Academic Hospital, 25 miles away. Doctors decided to destroy the diseased, swollen tissue with powerful gamma rays from a radium "needle"-actually a blunt metal capsule, 20 mm. by 3 mm., on a long, flexible shaft. One doctor pushed this up Joke's nose until it curved down into the nasopharynx...
...speech became nasal and thick, like a cleft-palate victim's. Damage to the Eustachian tube and repeated infections left him almost deaf on the right side, where he had been accustomed to placing patients, so that his chair and analytic couch had to be transposed. Hardly intelligible in German, he could not surmount the added difficulties of a foreign tongue (though he had spoken English and French fluently), observed to famed Singer Yvette Guilbert: "Meine Prothese spricht nicht französisch [My prosthesis does not speak French...