In the right hands it does all the time.
We get a lot of patients who had been having significant nasal problems for some time which is affecting their health and their quality of life both while awake and during sleep. The reason for writing this post is that these very patients who come to the clinic seeking consultation tend to balk when informed that surgery is the option either at the onset or after failure of medical treatment. They are afraid or not confident that surgery will help because of poor knowledge and misinformation. Datuk himself has first-hand experience because his wife was misinformed by her regular GP to never let an ENT do surgery on her nose despite her having significant nasal problems. The misinformation is partly due to the ENT specialist and partly due to the patients who have undergone nose surgery (Sinus surgery, Deviated Nasal septum surgery or Turbinate reduction surgery).
The ENT specialist may have been at fault because:
- Some have inadequate experience in doing such cases having come out to private practice too soon.
- Some have just enough experience to do simple nose cases but not enough experience to do complicated cases but still going ahead in doing the surgery ending up in a partly(poorly) done surgery.
- Some tend to do too much during surgery thinking the more that is removed the more spacious will the breathing passage be.
- Some do not follow through with the patient after surgery and/or spend enough time during the follow-up consultation tackling post-operation issues
Patient may also be at fault because some of them may not come for follow-up after surgery and also do not follow-up post-operative do’s and don’ts for reasons best known to themselves.
Successful surgery depends on the surgeon during the surgery. After the surgery is over, it depends on the patient and the surgeon for the 2 – 3 months immediately after the surgery especially for sinus surgery. There will be further posts which will better help you understand what we meant in this post.