Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Otosclerosis is a fairly common disease, being found, histologically, in 10% of the human temporal bones. But the abnormal bone formation that characterizes the disease causes hearing losses in only one tenth of the persons that have inherited the disease, which means that only 1% of the population has hearing loss caused by otosclerosis. What happens in these persons is that the stapes is fixed by the abnormal bone formation, causing what we call a conductive deafness. The person does not hear well because a significant part of the sound energy does not reach the receptor cells of the inner ear. It is like the cataract in the eye: the opaque lens does not allow all of the light to reach the receptor cells in the retina. The stapes fixation was described by Valsalva in 1704. A famous English otologist, Joseph Toynbee, made a detailed description the stapes fixation in 1841, but felt that this was caused by infections. It remained for Adam Politzer to describe the histologic feature...

My friend Sergio Carmona, an eminent neurologist from Argentina, sent me a very interesting book written by his friend Diego Golombek, who is professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Quilmes. The name of the book is “Las Neuronas de Dios” (God’s Neurons), and the author describes it as “a neuroscience of religion, spirituality and the light at the end of the tunnel.” His approach is quite original. He is not interested in conflicts between science and religion and he is convinced that to hypothesize incompatibilities between religion and science is a totally useless enterprise. His proposal is to study religions by means of scientific methods. His proposal is a study of the neuroscience of religion. In addition to God’s science and neurons, he also takes a look at God’s genes, God’s medications and God’s culture. He starts the book with a quotation forom Robert Pirsig, the American philosopher that wrote  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: When...

This is my first blog for 2016, and once again I want to thank all my readers and wish them a Happy New Year. A little late, isn’t it? But my wishes are sincere. Today I want to honor a friend that died many years ago. His name was Jack Urban. He was an optical and mechanical  engineer. Jack Urban (right) and Charles Graser, one of the first patients to receive a cochlear implant He developed many instruments for the House Medical Group in Los Angeles, including accessories for the surgical microscopes. But Jack was not the type of person from whom you would simply “order” something. He would come to the operating room so that he could understand what the surgeon wanted. And then he would manufacture a prototype and would again enter the operating room to see how it worked and whether he had to make any changes. Today many manufacturers of medical instruments sell “microdebriders,” often called “shavers.” These are instruments designed to cut and suction small bits of ti...