Otitis Externa and the Discharging Ear – Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

otitis externa and the discharging ear in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. A sore canal
2. Pull and press
3. Into the ear
4. Make room first
5. A closed canal
6. Why swimmers
7. A hole changes things
8. Itchy and blocked
9. One angry spot
10. It keeps coming back
11. Beyond the skin
12. Where from
13. Leave it alone
14. Two years wet
15. Off the shelf
16. Why not tablets
17. Back in the pool
18. The pinna joins in

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: A pocket of trapped skin in the upper drum, The problem lies in the canal, not the middle ear, Oral flucloxacillin taken by mouth for a full ten days, Warming the bottle before every dose is given, Place a wick to carry the drops down the canal, Chlorine in the pool damages the eardrum itself, It can be used at half the dose in this situation, A skin pocket pushing out into the canal, An infected hair follicle in the outer canal, The drops are the wrong antibiotic each time, The drum has perforated and is draining into the canal, From the gland lying in front of the ear, Repeated breaks in the canal skin from cleaning, Trapped skin eating into the bone behind the drum.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• A swollen canal with a normal drum beyond it.
• Pain on moving the pinna means the canal, not the drum.
• Drops with a steroid settle most sore canals.
• Drops cannot work on a canal packed with debris.
• A wick delivers the drops a shut canal blocks.
• Water strips the wax and the canal loses its guard.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all ENT and ophthalmology case decks · pediatric reference values.