Greetings

To all, greetings.

My name is Jim Huttner, and I developed the first Bionix Safe Ear Curette when I was a resident, some 27 years ago. Since then, I've been a practicing pediatrician as well as being the "in house" inventor of ear curettes for Bionix Medical Technologies. Most of the ear curette designs came about as a result of problems of ear wax removal encountered by physicians in their practices. We would meet them at national meetings--AAP, AAFP, PRI-Med's, etc.-- and they would discuss how they liked or disliked one curette or the other, noting that they were great for soft wax, but not stiff enough for hard wax, or too large to curette through the otoscope speculum, things like that. So I would go back, and with the help of our engineering staff would develop the next curette in the Safe Ear Curette line. (It helped a great deal that I was able to test out our new designs on my pediatric patients.)

We used that same kind of input/feedback to create the Lighted Ear Curette, bringing illumination and visualization to what used to be a blind procedure. And we also created the OtoClear Safe Irrigation System in response to the expressed need for a better way to irrigate cerumen from ears, one that would work safely and effectively on all patients.

Over the coming weeks and months, I will be writing about some of the challenges and experiences I've had removing wax (and other objects) from kids ears. I invite you to write and post your experiences, as well. Hopefully, we'll all learn better techniques for dealing with this common problem--wax impaction/obstruction-- and maybe some of those discussions will lead to the next new innovation in cerumen removal.

I'll look forward to reading your posts.

--James Huttner MD