Hyperhidrosis Surgery Results

The sympathectomy as its being done by most of the surgeons is very affective long term solution for hand sweating. The success rate is about 98% putting aside any technical or anatomical problems it would be closer to 100%. With regard to the facial blushing and or the facial sweating the success rate is lower and ranges well below 50% and is no longer recommended by many leading surgeons such as Dr. Reisfeld. Longer follow-up studies done by Dr. Reisfeld and other investigators showed that with time the success rate for patients with facial blushing is even lower. It is our understanding that this led to the decision by Dr. Reisfeld to abandon at present ETS as a choice for those the treatment of facial blushing and or facial sweating. There was a thought that patients who suffer from facial blushing/facial sweating as well as hand sweating will have better results when doing the ETS procedure for those cases with facial presentation but this ended up not being the case. In those cases there must be other factors which cause facial blushing and or facial sweating. Previous thinking that the ETS operation also helps with cases of social phobia, heart palpitations, and migraine headaches did not mature fully to those expectations. Yet there are some surgeons around the world who will erroneously perform ETS for the above mentioned clinical presentations. From our understanding Dr. Reisfeld will operate on patients with mild presentations of facial blushing and or facial sweating but only if their primary presentation is excessive hand sweating. If those patients get some relief with their facial presentation this is considered an added benefit but not as an indication for doing the surgery.

With regard to the success rate of ETS for feet sweating it became obvious that the success rate is extremely low. Initially a patient might feel reduction in the amount of his/her plantar sweating (foot sweating) but gradually they realize that the amount of plantar sweating is getting back to what it was or worse as years go by. Over the last few years a new and refined approach of the plantar sympathectomy to treat patients with plantar hyperhidrosis as a primary presentation or secondary that was not cured with ETS was developed. Previous theoretical side effects such as low blood pressure or retrograde ejaculation in the male population were proven not to be the case.

Lumbar Sympathectomy can be performed on an outpatient basis with a very high degree of success. (98-99%). The pain associated with this operation is far less than with ETS and so far the results obtained from different centers performing this procedure are very good.