Sir.—We thank the many AJDC readers who responded to our recent article and to Dr Fulginiti's editorial. Of the 15 correspondents, ten wrote to agree with our approach and four to disagree, and one commentator took an intermediate position. We have certainly achieved our goal of stirring debate regarding a widely proclaimed but poorly substantiated tenet of medical dogma.
Of the four dissenting correspondents, none challenged the efficacy of our approach. All wrote to say that six cases of epiglottitis were not sufficient to demonstrate our approach's safety, a point with which we agree, and that we made explicitly in our report. On the other hand, as we also noted in our report, the medical literature contains abundant opinion but hardly any objective data to suggest that our approach is dangerous. Of course, we believe that our approach is safe and reasonable, but we were not interested in arguing our