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Post Surgical Nasal Sinus Dysfunction/ENS
Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT) | Last Active: Sep 16, 2023 | Replies (28)Comment receiving replies
I feel I need to respond here just to say that not everyone has a bad outcome, and that sometimes the surgery is necessary.
Age a teen, I had a badly broken nose, and the GP said we needed to "keep an eye on it." In my 20's and 30's I had a constant round of sinus, ear and throat infections. After over 2 solid years of antibiotics, sprays and exams, at 40 my ENT said "Enough - the sinus cavities are now completely filled with nodules that are probably all infected. The side with the deviated cartilage is so narrow I can no longer scope it. We need to do surgery." I had the very painful surgery and recovery, but he was able to clean things out and reset the septum, and I had no complications.
Fast forward 30 years - I can count the number of ear and sinus infections since the surgery on one hand.
The takeaway - If anyone asked for my opinion, I would tell them it would be MY choice of last resort, but in the end, I am very happy I had it done. It improved my health immensely, so the benefit was worth the risk.
Has anyone else had sinus surgery that turned out well?
Sue
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@sueinmn-Hi Sue. Thank you for responding and sharing your experience.
As you can see in one of my posts I state that these surgeries should be reserved for those who have had an accident which has broken their nose, requiring reconstruction.
There are plenty of success stories you can find from doctors or the small 10% of people with whom the elective surgeries were deemed necessary.
This post is to create a fair balance to share with people what is often not shared in honest and true form in the medical setting. For those who are recommended/presented these surgeries for minor nuances that have nothing to do with anatomy being the cause.
This is to make people aware that there is so much more to the nose that is responsible for some of their issues outside of anything that can be addressed with the ENT algorithm of Antibiotics/Topical Sprays/Surgeries.
Only 10% of patients who present to an ENT ever truly “need” or will benefit from surgery.
I have attached 5 journal/articles which share clinical trials from otolaryngology. These are articles from ENTs themselves. Just to be fair. So you can see that ENTs also know this.
https://aah-library.libanswers.com/loaderTicket?fid=2016434&type=0&key=7c23740ba0ef249ff3c937f2bb15038b
https://www.academia.edu/25407504/Evaluation_of_the_medical_and_surgical_treatment_of_chronic_rhinosinusitis_a_prospective_randomised_controlled_trial
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038021
https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/28/1/68
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2273.2000.00359.x