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Okay. So some patients ask me like, you know what I want you to do just one part of my septum, or could you correct this or correct that. What I do is I call it complete septoplasty because I try to correct and complete the entire septum. And the reason I do this is because septoplasty by itself is one of the least successful procedures. If you look at all commerce and septoplasty the overall satisfaction rate is gonna be between anywhere from 50 to 80%. And this was on a study by a new one serving in long term results of septoplasty. So you’re seeing that basically 20 to 50% of patients. Who’ve had a septoplasty note that it fails, and that’s not really an encouraging number for patients who are trying to improve their breathing. The second question you ask is aside from this is why
Is this failing? And the reason this is failing is that patients note the severe deviation of the caudal septum, the anterior septum, where most of these septal deviations are occurring. And so for me looking at this, this is a very difficult prompt to correct deviated septum. And my role as a rhinoplasty surgeon is twofold. Number one is I want to improve the foundation of your nose. So functionally, your nose works the best that it can. But the second thing is I want your foundation to be as straight as possible because I want your nose to aesthetically look the best. So, I do this technique called complete septoplasty. And a big part of this technique is I try to straighten out the entire septum, including the hardest part to straighten out, which is the anterior wall caudal aspect of it, but also the top part of the septum.
And then all these little simulations, deviations, and spurs. These are little things that occur in the airway that jump out. It is not possible to remove these safely without using a tool like a Piezo ultrasonic tool. And so it’s very time consuming. But what I do is I remove all these little bone deviations so that the septum is as thin as straight and as strong as possible. And that means I release the septum, make this as straight as possible and remove all these little deviations.
Does that lead to better results? In my honest opinion, I think it does. And I have some data that’s preliminary that I can back it up with with something called a nose scale. And do I think that patients would benefit from this approach? In my opinion, if you’re gonna do a septoplasty, you might as well straighten out the whole thing because otherwise, statistically speaking, there’s a good chance that you’re gonna want to do some type of surgery or something else Down the line.
So septoplasty, if you’re gonna do it, do the whole thing. Very tough to do a complete septoplasty, but that’s my approach.
