April 4, 2023 For Our Patients and Their Families: After 24 years of private practice, Dr. Holmes has decided to leave a final professional legacy through teaching residents and medical students in Mobile at the University of South Alabama. We have attempted multiple times to recruit an ENT to take over but there were no suitable candidates. Therefore, ENT & Audiology Associates will cease operations at the end of September 2023. We are grateful for all you and for our staff who comprise the ultimate team imaginable. This transition is bittersweet, to say the least, and all of us are exper ..read more

Capt Pete Mitchell, USN fighter pilot, call sign “Maverick”, swoops his fighter jet through the valley, crests the mountain top, avoiding setting off the radar guided missiles, into the crater, spies his objective: the portal to the nuclear reactor. Activating his image guidance system, he sends a hypersonic laser guided missile with a direct hit, sending flame and fire and pressurized gases down the corridor into the reactor.  He trained for such a moment all his life, beginning with fast motorcycles and the feeling of speed, the need for speed, the adrenalin of supersonic ..read more

From Dr. Douglas Holmes: A year or so ago, I envisioned adding cochlear implants to our practice.  Several factors moved me in that direction: 1) The FDA approved Cochlear Implants (CI) for single sided deafness (SSD).  If you had a hearing loss in one ear only, that was not helped by a hearing aid, the FDA finally recognized what we knew long ago: how debilitating to hear from one ear only.  And conversely, how incredibly beneficial it is to have stereo hearing.  (Try plugging one ear.)  Several insurance companies have decided to cover this procedure for SSD, but unf ..read more

When you’ve been in practice for many years, when you have some gray hair, gray being the majority of the hair I have left, and many of your peers have stopped practicing or stopped operating for one reason or another, then it is inevitable that the question arises: from patients:  Dr. Holmes, when are you going to retire? or stated more emphatically and  desperately:  Dr. Holmes, you can’t retire! from colleagues in the hospital or at meetings (pre covid when we had meetings):  How long you gonna keep doing this? Well, I have a reply: I love being a doctor. I love being a ..read more

I have studied loss and grief just like any other physician, including the classic works of Kubler-Ross’ grief stages of death and dying. All very academic, all very clinical, until it happens to you. In Kubler-Ross it is your own death and dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – all about how you feel about your own demise. Not how you feel about others, your spouse, your mom and dad, your brothers and sisters, your children, your colleagues – and certainly not how you feel about your dog. April 1, 2021 at 2:17 we lost our dog. I know it was 2:17 because my cell phone rang ..read more

An open letter to insurance moderators and the medical world, regarding retrograde cricopharyngeus (CP) dysfunction (RCPD), no burpers: Thank you for the opportunity to disclose and disseminate what I have learned about the no burpers of the world – the folks who experience RCPD and cannot burp. If one cannot burp, then all the gas you swallow or the gas created by food and drink stays within the GI tract, resulting in bloating and pain, every day, every night.  Since the gas needs to go somewhere, it eventually results in excessive flatulence, obviously a significant social problem for ..read more

I hesitate to add to the cacophony surrounding the corona virus, but these are ‘unprecedented’ times, or so that’s what I’ve heard and read a thousand times. If I ever see that word again it will be too soon. Challenging? Yes Unusual? Of course Unprecedented?Aabsolutely not. And not even unpredicted. This pandemic was preceded by H1N1 flu virus (1918 flu pandemic, 2009 swine flu), SARS (2003) and MERS (2012), both corona viruses. The 1918 flu pandemic killed 50 million people worldwide, with 675,000 Americans. With Covid-19 to date about there are 338,000 deaths worldwide, with 96,000 in the U ..read more

“You’re a bad ass” he said as I walked into his hospital room, making post op rounds from the previous day’s surgery. Yesterday I spent five hours excavating this huge tumor from his neck. A local spread from a poorly differentiated squamous cell skin cancer previously removed from the back portion of his neck, just behind and below his left ear. These poorly differentiated cells are the worst; wild cancer cells running amok in the lymphatic system, multiplying and invading locally, infiltrating into surrounding muscle and skin. Pre op exam revealed an 8 x 5 x 3 cm mass, firm, fixed, right up ..read more

While we are focusing so much attention on the coronavirus, we mustn’t lose focus on our other healthcare needs. The need for my wife and me this week was our second shingles vaccine. That very nasty shingles attack is caused by the chickenpox virus (varicella zoster, a type of herpes virus different from the cold sore or genital type) that lives dormantly in our nerve roots, just waiting for who knows what conditions to break out along that nerve’s distribution and cause awful pain, blisters, loss of nerve function with facial paralysis (if it happens along the facial nerve), and possible pos ..read more

For urgent or compelling needs, our office is open for face-to-face (with a mask), hands-on (with gloves) good old fashioned in-person office visits and examinations for the most accurate diagnosis and the most effective treatment. If and when you need us for urgent issues, we will take your temperature, have you wear a mask, and gel your hands. And when you leave the exam room it will be disinfected with 70% alcohol. Dr. Holmes is seeing patients with urgent needs in the office on Monday and Wednesday mornings and afternoons as well as Friday mornings. Please call 919-782-9003 to schedule an ..read more