About

I am Russell Faust, PhD, MD, author of of this site …

To summarize my approach to my patients: I treat you and your children like my own family. I will never recommend that you consider a treatment or procedure on this blog, or in my clinical practice, that I would not advise for my own children, or my own family. This makes my job much easier – I don’t need to consider your insurance, religion, gender, skin color, or anything beyond your medical issues, in order to make a sound recommendation and help you and your children achieve optimal health.

I am just a simple boogor doctor (oto-rhino-laryngologist, popularly referred to as an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) surgeon), trying to make my contribution to the world. ENT is the oldest board-certified medical specialty in the United States. It was originally Eye-Ear-Nose-and-Throat. The study and treatment of eyes became complicated enough that it separated into its own specialty (Ophthalmology) in the 1960s.

An ENT doc is specially trained (between 5 and 7 years beyond medical school) in the medical and surgical treatment of the ears, nose, throat, and any other structures of the head and neck besides the eyeballs and the brain. Some of us specialize to operate on these also, but usually as part of a team with an eye surgeon (Ophthalmologist) or brain surgeon (Neurosurgeon). Some of us specialize beyond the ENT residency to focus on a particular group of patients; I specialized by extending my training through a Fellowship in Pediatric ENT.

I am board-certified by the American Board of Otolaryngology. My MD is from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where I remained for residency training in Otolaryngology (before that I earned my PhD in cell and molecular biology from the University of Washington, Seattle). Following residency I received advanced Fellowship training in Pediatric Otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins University Medical Institutes.

When I was in medical school and I was considering the various fields of medicine to go into, the docs in ENT told me half-jokingly that ENT stood for Early Nights and Tennis. I was hooked. They lied. Most academic ENT docs put in somewhere between 70 and 80 hours per week, teaching medical students and resident physicians, preparing and giving lectures to other physicians about updates in our specialty, seeing patients in clinics, operating on some of these patients, going to see acutely ill patients in the emergency department, going to see acutely ill patients admitted to the hospital, and generally trying to provide the best possible care to our patients. There are few early nights, and I haven’t played tennis in over 20 years. Still, it is a great life! Any medical students in this reader community should give ENT serious consideration as a great way of life.

Personal: I have a great family, with a wife that represents not my better half, but my better 90% (maybe more), and we are blessed with 3 relatively healthy children. Luckily, none of them are overly troubled by the things that I write about. On the other hand, I have been plagued by many of the chronic disorders that I write about here, and my own struggle with allergies (food and airborne) and recurrent and chronic sinusitis started as a kid. My own frustration with conventional medical treatment of my allergies and sinusitis has led me gradually to embrace an integrated holistic approach to my own disease, and therefore, a similar approach to my patients. This approach has been successful and profoundly gratifying.

My clinical practice focuses on children with asthma, allergies, rhinitis, sinusitis, and reflux, and helping them to avoid surgery. By working with a multi-disciplinary group of docs from various specialties (Allergy, Immunology, Pulmonology, Gastroenterology, Neurology, as well as Naturopathic Doctors, in addition to ENT), we have been 80-90% successful in our goal of avoiding surgery by reducing symptoms through an integrative holistic medicine approach. Even for those few whose disease is so severe that they warrant surgery, my approach has been minimally-invasive surgery, meaning to do the very least amount of surgery to obtain the very greatest benefit, and only as a last resort.