WHEN Carol Vaness, the opera singer, was involved in a horrific car accident she cried out so much for help as she kicked her way out of her blazing car that she damaged her vocal cords.

Vaness, 52, who played the title role of Tosca opposite Luciano Pavarotti in his last performance at London’s Covent Garden, knew who to turn to: the music industry’s “laser doctor”.

Steven Zeitels, a leading throat specialist who has treated the voices of 40 singers, including Julie Andrews, the original Maria in The Sound of Music, has now developed a pulsed laser that can safely treat their disorders without damaging the vocal cords.

Vaness was back in fine voice on stage in Seattle last week in Der Rosenkavalier. “I was able to sing an entire opera at six weeks,” she said. “It was amazing how free my voice felt and how young and fresh.”

Zeitels’s latest success, Steve Tyler, lead singer of the rock band Aerosmith, goes back on tour next week. The frontman had to cancel 20 concerts on his last tour after a blood vessel popped on his right vocal cord and reduced his singing voice to a hoarse shrill. It was the result of 33 years of singing on stage.

Zeitels pointed his laser down Tyler’s throat on an operating table at Massachusetts general hospital and, using rapid-fire bursts of green light, sealed the blood vessel without touching it. The operation was so fast that there was no heat to inflame and damage Tyler’s vocal folds.

The treatment lasted barely half an hour. Tyler was told to rest his voice for three weeks before he started singing again.

British doctors are so impressed with the results that they are travelling to Boston in October to bring the treatment method to Britain.

They believe it could enable some of the 10,000 people diagnosed each year with throat cancer to avoid painful surgery and the consequent risk of damage to their voices if their condition is spotted early enough.

Zeitels developed the pulsed laser after noticing another doctor used a similar device to treat birthmarks on babies without burning their skins.

So far he has used it on 15 singers and has just published the successes in the medical journal Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology.

He has also used it to treat pre-cancerous lesions known as dysplasia. The lesions fall off after the treatment, with no permanent damage to the voice.

He said last week: “The signature of your voice is your mouth, your nose, your throat. It’s like the box of a guitar.

“The horn of the throat makes it sound quite unique. But anything that alters the pliability of the vocal membranes impairs the ability to translate the air from the windpipe into sound.”

The vocal cord is like a valve. It opens when you breathe but when it closes it goes into a process called entrained vibration. Voice specialists draw an analogy with a child blowing their lips to make a raspberry sound. As they blow air, the lips open and then recoil.

An average man’s vocal cords open and close 100 times a second. A woman’s natural frequency is higher: between 180 and 230 cycles per second. Over the years the constant movement can cause problems.

Singers are the most vulnerable. The biggest risk is to opera singers, who strain their voice boxes hitting high notes, and stadium rock performers like Tyler.

Zeitels added: “Singers are the athletes of the performing arts. But these collisions and stress in the vocal cords eventually create problems like nodules, polyps and, in Steve Tyler’s case, haemorrhaging from a blood vessel that was abnormal from years of singing. We have developed technology that is capable of dealing with these problems.”

He uses a light that is pulsed to last just 15/1,000ths of a second. It can alter the blood supply to the throat without burning the tissue. He is now working on new methods to restore pliability to voices like that of Julie Andrew’s by strengthening the membranes.

John Rubin, medical director of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in London and a former president of the British Voice Association, is one of the doctors from the UK visiting Zeitels in October to learn about the technology.

Rubin said: “I am fascinated to see how it works. This could revolutionise therapy for patients in the early stages of throat cancer.

“If we can treat throat cancers with lasers through the mouth it means we can avoid radiation therapy or mutilating surgery. It could mean just an overnight stay in hospital for patients.”

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