L to R: Dr. Robert Bastian, Dr. Christy Ludlow, Dr. Andrew Blitzer, Dr. Joel Blumin, Dr. Seth Dailey, and Dr. Brent Richardson

Bastian Voice Institute physicians Dr. Bastian and Dr. Richardson both spoke on May 3 at the National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association’s (NSDA) 25th Anniversary Symposium, held at the Hilton Garden Inn O’Hare Airport in Des Plaines, IL.

The symposium featured a number of medical professionals who have extensive experience with spasmodic dysphonia, and the sessions included panel discussions and audience Q&A. The stated goals of the symposium were: to provide a learning environment in which people with spasmodic dysphonia may enhance their understanding of the disorder; to facilitate an exchange of information on how to live effectively with the disorder; and to increase NSDA’s capabilities in measuring and understanding the needs of its members in order to develop future programs.

To learn about other NSDA events, see their website.

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Bastian Voice Institute physician Dr. Robert Bastian contributed two articles to the new book The Ultimate Guide to Singing: Gigs, Sound, Money and Health. The book includes 18 chapters with answers to 187 different questions asked by singers, on topics from navigating the music business to keeping one’s voice healthy.

Dr. Bastian wrote answers to the questions “Is getting surgery done on the voice ‘bad’?” and “How do I cope with the overwhelming vocal demands of gigs six nights a week? Help!” To that second question, Dr. Bastian discusses how to incorporate an “early warning system” for the health of your vocal folds—vocal tasks that he calls vocal fold swelling checks or swelling tests—into your daily routine. He also recently released a video on vocal fold swelling checks, explaining why they are beneficial and how to use them.

Learn more about The Ultimate Guide to Singing at its official webpage.

Bastian Voice Institute has recently added a virtual office tour to its website. We invite you to explore the friendly confines of our office space with this new virtual tour, which contains a plethora of 360-degree panoramas created by Google and a Google-licensed photographer. Walk in our front door, come up to the check-in counter, stroll through the waiting room and down our back hallway, and pop into our various examination and lab rooms. We particularly hope that this virtual office tour will give first-time patients a bit more peace of mind as they prepare for their first visit. Take a look!

Dr. Bastian’s educational website, Bastian Medical Media for Laryngology,has received a significant facelift. The website’s large repository of multimedia encyclopedia entries—featuring information about disorders of the larynx, throat, and upper airways—are now grouped into topical landing pages, like “Swallowing disorders” or “Diagnostics: Voice phenomenology.” This addition gives users one more way to explore the site, in addition to keyword search and photo and video galleries.

In the past few months, Bastian Medical Media for Laryngology has also become more mobile-friendly and has been optimized for faster load times. In addition, many new entries, photos, and videos continue to be added to fill out the website’s range of information. The website’s mission is: “to educate about voice, swallowing, airway, coughing, and other head and neck disorders in order to help people work more effectively with their personal physicians.”

Bastian Voice Institute physicians Dr. Bastian and Dr. Richardson both taught courses at the 2013 Annual Meeting for the American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, held from September 29 to October 2 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The annual conference draws thousands of attendees.

Dr. Bastian taught two courses. The first, “Vocal Play in the Diagnosis of Voice Disorders,” was about how clinicians can assess the voice’s capabilities, limitations, and aberrations by eliciting a variety of vocal tasks. The patient’s responses to these elicitations can provide critical information not revealed by the examination. The second course, entitled “Chronic Cough and Other Sensory Disturbances in the Head and Neck,” mainly addressed sensory neuropathic cough, as well as other elusive “sensations” that are often overlooked.

Dr. Richardson taught the course “Dyspnea and Noisy Breathing: Organic or Non-organic?“, which presented a diagnostic method to determine the causes of airway symptoms that have elusive diagnoses, and management of these problems, the treatment of which can sometimes be recalcitrant.

Health enews, a service of Advocate Health Care, recently published an article on spasmodic dysphonia (SD), a neurological voice disorder. Bastian Voice Institute’s Dr. Bastian is included in the article as an expert on SD.

Bastian Voice Institute has a significant caseload of SD patients, performing about 80 Botox injections per month. Periodic injections of Botox into the tiny muscles of the larynx are currently the most effective treatment for SD in widespread use.

You can learn more about SD by seeing our educational website’s entry on SD, which includes teaching videos made by Dr. Bastian.

This month the YouTube channel for Bastian Voice Institute and its educational offshoot, Bastian Medical Media for Laryngology, surpassed the 500,000-view mark.

Our YouTube channel features more than 25 educational videos on a variety of voice, swallowing, airway, and coughing disorders. The three most-watched videos are: Mucus Retention Cyst: Before and After; Laryngospasm: Sudden, Terrifying Difficulty Breathing; and Cricopharyngeus Spasm: A Troubling Feeling of a Lump in the Throat. To receive notifications when we release new videos, you can subscribe to us on our channel page.

Dr. Robert Bastian will be a keynote speaker next month at the 2013 Phonosurgery Symposium, presented by the National Center for Voice and Speech. The conference will be held on July 18-19, 2013, in Salt Lake City, Utah, and this year’s focus is “How Behavioral Treatment Can Enhance Surgical Outcomes.” Dr. Bastian will share an address entitled “A Laryngologist’s View of the Role of Speech/Voice Therapy in the Surgical Patient.” The surgery in question is microsurgery on the vocal folds.

To learn about topics like speech therapy and vocal fold microsurgery, visit Dr. Bastian’s educational website, Bastian Medical Media for Laryngology.

Bastian Voice Institute now has its own page on Facebook. You can go here to find our page, see photos of our office, follow our updates, and “like” us.

Bastian Voice Institute is now on Twitter. Follow us at @bastianvoicedoc to receive selected excerpts from our growing set of encyclopedia entries, photos, and videos available at Bastian Medical Media, as well as alerts when we add new entries or multimedia. Our aim is to help more people with voice, swallowing, airway, and cough disorders to work more effectively with their personal physicians.