Today I went to see a new ear, nose, and throat doctor and learned of some surprising things. The reason being is I have become upset with my current ear, nose, and throat doctor. I have noticed blood occasionally coming out of my right nostril, and my doctor thinks it’s because it is just dry. Well I never had any problems prior to seeing him with blood coming out of my nose. So that’s why I wanted to see a new one.
Background
My current ear, nose, and throat doctor operated on me back in August of 2006 to drain my right maxillary sinus. This was because the only finding on my MRI was an infection in my right maxillary sinus. So after the antibiotics didn’t work he drained my sinus. This was hopefully going to get rid of my 24/7 headache, but it didn’t.
The New Doctor
The new ear, nose, and throat doctor I saw today explained to me about how my right maxillary sinus is much smaller than the left, something that only 2% of people have. In the past, like 15 years ago, he would have performed operations to drain the smaller maxillary sinus. However, he never noticed any improvement in symptoms for anyone unless they were complaining of severe pain right where the maxillary sinus is. So now he does not operate and leaves it alone. People who have a smaller maxillary sinus tend to develop it around 5 years of age and never know. The only way to tell is by getting some sort of imaging done. Another interesting point the new doctor made, is that one of my former CT scans I had done noted that there was something missing in my right maxillary sinus. Well, it turns out that whenever there is a smaller sinus than the other, it never has this thing that was supposedly missing. So therefore the radiologist who reviewed the CT scan did not know about the differences between normal and smaller sinuses.
Discrepancy
The new doctor I saw and my current doctor both practice the same field of medicine, yet they feel differently about performing sinus surgery on a sinus that is much smaller than the other sinus. Further, the new doctor does not think there is any correlation between the sinus and my head pounding.