Description
In this video, Dr. Merrill, an ENT specialist at UAMS Health, explains how sinus and nasal conditions are evaluated and treated — starting with simple over-the-counter options like saline rinses, nasal steroids, and antihistamines, and progressing to advanced medical therapies, imaging, and surgery when needed. Learn how a stepwise, personalized approach helps patients get the relief they deserve. You’ll also hear about warning signs that should prompt a visit to a specialist, including persistent nasal blockage, vision changes, facial pain or numbness, and changes around the eyes or face. With access to a multidisciplinary team across allergy, immunology, rheumatology, and more, UAMS Health provides comprehensive care for conditions that affect more than just the nose. If you’ve felt stuck living with sinus pressure, drainage, or a chronic runny nose, this video shows there may be more options — and more hope — than you realize.
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Transcript
When treating somebody for runny nose or sinus issues from the beginning, some of the first things that we’ll start with are medical treatments that are actually available over the counter. Things like saline rinses, topical nasal steroids, and topical nasal antihistamines are all available at your local drugstore. And those really form the basis of our medical treatment to start.
If things like that don’t get patients the relief that they need, we may pursue things like oral steroids or oral antibiotics if there’s concern for an infection. Again, after that point, we may consider something like an endoscopy or imaging. And if those things reveal sinus disease that’s still persistent despite all of those appropriate medical treatments, we would then have a conversation about the appropriateness of surgery.
Signs that would warrant coming to see a specialist would be persistent nasal obstruction, changes in vision, any sort of movement of your eye out of its normal place, changes in your facial structure, or numbness or severe pain in the face. All of those things could be reasons that we may be able to help you here at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
From a sinonasal standpoint, I think that working at UAMS really offers a lot of multidisciplinary connections in terms of working with allergy and immunology providers, rheumatologists as well. We’re all able to talk together and get on the same page with balancing these diseases that often impact more than just people’s noses.
Something that I see some patients come to me saying is, you know, they had thought that they just had to live with their runny nose or their sinus pressure. And I think that at this point we have a lot of different treatment options that I think a lot of people are not quite aware of.
So seeing patients who kind of come in with that attitude of this kind of hopelessness—feeling like they’re stuck living with the kind of runny nose or sinus pressure or drainage that they’re dealing with—and being able to offer some new treatment options to them to help give them some relief really has been rewarding for my time here in Arkansas.
