How can a piano help an ENT specialist? It may sound strange but experts are now using it to diagnose and treat the voice disorders of patients."The first important step towards correcting voice disorder is to listen that, in order to detect the disorder. So we ask the patient to speak at highest pitch. Simultaneously, we also play the piano alongside and on each key we record and document the pitch of his voice," an American speech and voice disorders specialist James P Thomas said.Thomas, based in Oregon, US, is in the capital for a two-day workshop on ENT being organised at the Army Hospital Research and Referral (AHR and R)."As a person speaks, a camera is passed from the nasal way to the wind pipe. The camera takes pictures as fast as possible on the movement of the defective vocal cords," HoD of the ENT department, AHR and R, Surgeon Captain S Badhwar said.Once diagnosis is done, surgery or speech therapy is suggested. "Surgery is suggested for vocal overdoers or people who like to talk and typically suffer from swellings on the vocal folds and vocal underdoers or people who don't talk much and typically suffer from thinning or atrophy of the vocal folds," Director General of Armed Forces Medical Services Lieutenant General Yogendra Singh said.Defective vocal cords can also happen due to cancer, accident, breaking up of important blood vessels or infections.Giving details about the surgery, Captain Badhwar said, "We conduct a surgery wherein we steal a nerve from neck and hook it to one of the voice cords,"Captain Badhwar said, "We have a young naval officer who met with a serious accident and lost his voice. With help from Dr Thames and with this new surgical procedure we will operate on him."Once the surgery is over the patient is again made to go through the piano session."The patient again is made to speak at the highest pitch. The piano is played again and his new pitch is recorded. And then the old and the new records are compared. On comparison we can suggest whether the treatment has been effective or not," Dr Thomas said.The voice box has several functions like breathing, airway protection during swallowing and voice production.Almost every human depends on these functions including voice production every day. Voice can be be loud and soft, high or low.
