It started with a whistling sound in his nose. Then things got much worse

Published April 19, 2025

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 quotes Eugene Kern about “Empty Nose Syndrome,” a disorder Kern discovered at the Mayo clinic in 1994. “They have to breathe through the mouth. You no longer get the feeling of normal breathing,” says Kern, who believes ENS occurs more frequently than known. While at Mayo, Kern treated nearly 250 ENS patients, all of whom had undergone turbinate surgery elsewhere. “I was seeing four or five patients a week,” Kern says, adding that it goes undiagnosed because many doctors “don’t understand the mechanism. It’s easy to diagnose when you know what you are looking for. You can’t miss it.”

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