With some 14.6 million patients seen during 2013, plastic surgeons are always improving things by doing some noteworthy science.
Here are a few briefs on what cosmetic plastic surgeons and others are doing to make rejuvenation surgery ever better:
- Fear Surgery? Surgeons know that some people irrationally fear surgery so much, they delay the procedure and cause themselves unnecessary anxiety. According to Gildasio De Oliveria, Jr. M.D., writing in the International Journal of Surgery, some patients are so fearful, they suffer unnecessary pain and other complications. The solution? A tool to calculate surgical risks. Test patients estimated they had a 20 to 30 percent chance of not surviving one surgery. But the surgical risk tool – based on 1.4 million surgeries from 400 hospitals — showed the actual risk was one percent. Letting patients know about the risk tool calmed many down, making the procedure go smoother. (Read the fear of surgery study.)
(Learn how plastic surgery patients are prepared.)
- Best Way to Keep Nasal Passageways Open
Nose doctors have a variety of tools and ways to open blocked nasal channels for healthy breathing when a patient has a nasal obstruction. That blockage is often due to one of three nasal structures known as turbinates, necessary organs that filter, warm and humidify the air you breathe.
(See at a sketch of the turbinates.)
The lowest or inferior turbinate is often the bugbear that:
- Swells for a variety of reasons
- Blocks the nasal passage
- Prevents natural drainage
- Allows germ to grow
Then, patients think they must have sinusitis, because the symptoms are similar. Now, writing in the professional magazine, Laryngoscope, doctor-authors rank the many surgical techniques to reduce the size of the inferior turbinate.
(Learn more about turbinate reduction surgery.)
Best technique? Something known as submucosal resection which means the surgeon reduces the skin-like covering of the bony turbinate. That skin can swell tremendously in allergic patients and for many other reasons.
Yet another best practice technique is partial resection in which some bone and some of the overlying mucus-producing skin are removed in one stroke.
(Read more about the inferior turbinate article.)
