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Over the past year our Academy has been presented with a proposal to change its name to The American Academy of Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialists. This proposal represents an effort to provide the American public with a more user-friendly designation of us as specialists. While we applaud an examination of our public identity, we have serious concerns about both the proposed name change and our method of probing this important issue.
In the past, the designation of our specialty as "Ear, Nose, and Throat" fostered several unintended connotations. Frequently shortened to an acronym, ENT was applied to the specialty, its surgical procedures, and its practitioners. Our Academy long ago recognized that the acronym "ENT" represents an incomplete list of the anatomical sites that we address as specialists, and as such, efforts were made in the 1960s to change our designation to one more reflective of our growing scope of