Comments | thekumquat: Getting my money's worth out of the NHS!

thekumquat

Getting my money's worth out of the NHS!

May 03, 2007 13:56

My appt began at 9.15, included a 50-minute hearing test, and resulted in my leaving at 11.45. There were two audiologists with me for most of that, so that's 5 hours of their time, and lots of running from room to room in the last hour as we scrounged space, given I was only booked in for 90 minutes ( Read more... )

deaf

Comments 10

aster13 May 3 2007, 13:51:47 UTC

Cool!

What do you know about the genetics of earwax (cerumen) production?
*interested*

(oh yes, ok, i admit it, i'm a health geek!) >.

thekumquat May 3 2007, 14:27:36 UTC

Go to Medline (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=pubmed)
Enter earwax, gene

Basically there are two main types of earwax, wet and dry. Dry is the common phenotype in East Asia - it's crumbly, wet in the West - the yellow gunk. There's one major earwax-phenotype gene, ABCC11, that's been mapped and is near other medically-interesting genes.

Dry earwax correlates with lack of colustrum (rich early breast milk) production, (which is why I researched it for my thesis), and altered earwax can be a sign of other apocrine glands (ie the mammary galnds) being buggered (to use the technical term!).

aster13 May 4 2007, 08:52:02 UTC

*geeks out*

Oooh, this is really interesting. I am such a geek pandemona is right. Just not a computer geek.

What was your thesis on?

lovingboth May 3 2007, 13:58:53 UTC

'Ouch' for the previous situation and hooray for the new one.

Go on, you have a large number of people interested in the genetics of earwax now, and you know it :)

thekumquat May 3 2007, 14:29:12 UTC

See comment above. I don't appear to produce hardly any earwax, leading to the oddest complement I've ever received, from a previous audiologist, "You have the cleanest ears I've ever met!"

barakta May 3 2007, 14:50:16 UTC

Wow. Well done for scaring audiologists. Did you grab a copy of this scary looking audiogram?

FWIW I don't have recruitment in any way at all and feedback even the not painful kind drives me completely batshit.

thekumquat May 3 2007, 15:54:32 UTC

I could draw it - it's altered quite a bit although within 10 dB at each frequency. Basically goes -30, 0, -45, -50, -50, -60, +10, -20, -30. Gone from a smooth cookiebite to a steeper slope between 5 and 6 kHz, -60 to +10 really quickly. Amplifying the one and not the other is a technical conundrum ( ... )

judiff May 3 2007, 15:15:00 UTC

cool!
(specailly the earwax stuff)

jhg May 3 2007, 15:44:43 UTC

Hooray!