Surgery to Stop Sweating

[ronr]

I put this here since we have talked about excessive sweating being one of the oddball symptoms of Fibro.


Surgery to Stop Sweating

"The sympathetic nervous system is wired abnormally in these people so that they're more sensitive to the normal triggers for sweating," Curtis Dickman, M.D., a neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Ariz., told Ivanhoe.

Surgery used to mean cutting open the chest and a week or more in the hospital.

"It was a tremendously painful procedure and was very difficult to identify these sympathetic nerves with that very invasive technique," Dr. Dickman said.

Now doctors make two small incisions under the armpit and cut the nerve that supplies the sweat glands. Patients go home the same day.

"It changes the way that the body sweats," Dr. Dickman explained. "The patients no longer sweat on their hands or their armpits, and sometimes on their head and face they also have diminished sweating."

In a recent study involving 300 patients, the surgery was successful in treating over 99 percent of those with hyperhidrosis of the hands and 61 percent of those with excessive sweating under the arms.

Read the full article at:
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=22509

[BRPFan]

Neat article! I too sweat like a rented mule and think it's just another oddball symptom of Fibro, ever though I sweated quite a bit before I really got ill.

[rwilli]

   It looks like I am still learning more about FM. Since I have had it since I was 13 I never really took notice of things like this. While in the steam room I could make a small pool, constant stream, while everyone else was barely dripping.                 rwilli