The amount of compensatory sweating depends on the patient, the damage that the white rami communicans incurs, and the amount of cell body reorganization in the spinal cord after surgery.
Other potential complications include inadequate resection of the ganglia, gustatory sweating, pneumothorax, cardiac dysfunction, post-operative pain, and finally Horner’s syndrome secondary to resection of the stellate ganglion.
www.ubcmj.com/pdf/ubcmj_2_1_2010_24-29.pdf

After severing the cervical sympathetic trunk, the cells of the cervical sympathetic ganglion undergo transneuronic degeneration
After severing the sympathetic trunk, the cells of its origin undergo complete disintegration within a year.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0442.1967.tb00255.x/abstract

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Fifty-one percent of the participants claimed that their quality of life decreased

Quote: "Fifty-one percent of the participants claimed that their quality of life decreased moderately or severely as a result of CS, but only one-third of them (7.9% children vs. 22.4% others, P = 0.001) would not have undergone the operation in retrospect." *


Comment from CSMESS: Half of patients felt their quality of life was lowered by the surgery! Half! One out of three patients regretted the surgery!! Worse yet, they try to make that out to be a surprisingly low percentage by stating the statistic as "only one-third".

"Only"?? Are you kidding me? Since when is having one third of your patients end up worse off after a permanent, destructive nerve surgery considered a surprisingly good result?

How can a surgery for a benign condition -- a surgery performed for the sole purpose of increasing quality of life -- be considered justified when over half of the patients end up with lower quality of life?

And then on top of it all, they recommend ETS for children -- creatures whose minds and bodies have not fully developed -- based on the answers these children give to questions posed by adult authority figures? Doctors, no less.

I guess I should be happy they published these numbers. I believe that they are representative of reality in terms of the percentage of people who end up with lower quality of life from ETS. It's a far cry from the "5% get bad side effects" crap that most prospective patients are told in order to get them to have the surgery. Still, it is unfathomable to me that an article citing a lowering of quality of life for half the patients and a third regretting the surgery can be spun positively. (http://etsandreversals.yuku.com/directory)

*Pediatr Surg Int. 2007 Nov 13 [Epub ahead of print] Links
Do children tolerate thoracoscopic sympathectomy better than adults?Steiner Z, Cohen Z, Kleiner O, Matar I, Mogilner J.
Department of Pediatric Surgery, Hillel Yaffe Medical Center, P. O. Box 169, Hadera, 38100, Israel, steiner@hy.health.gov.il.