While medications can be used to treat the majority of patients with nasal congestion, there are many people that simply can not breathe through their noses despite these medications. It is these patients with difficulty breathing through their noses, who generally have difficulty sleeping, frequently snore and generally complain of dryness in their mouths that we are treating surgically.

Some people choose to have surgery so that they can stop using medications to clear their noses.
In patients where the nasal congestion is more severe generally the nasal septum (the wall that divides the left and right sides of the nose) is bent (deviated). The turbinates may also have bony enlargement rather than soft tissue enlargement. In this situation an endoscopic nasal septoplasty and turbinate reduction can be performed in the operating room under general anesthesia or under local anesthesia with sedation. The endoscopes give us an excellent view allowing removal of only the excess tissues and minimizing injury to the normal tissues. Nasal packing is rarely used and patients frequently breathe thru their noses immediately. The fully opened nose may not be apparent for 2-4 weeks.

There is no longer any pain, bruising or swelling associated with this operation. Most ear nose and throat surgeons that perform this operation use packing that is very uncomfortable for up to 4 days. We find this to be completely unnecessary and not associated with any significant increase in post-operative bleeding. We have been using this technique over the past 19 years on thousands of patients. We urge patients that are considering having nasal surgery and were told that nasal packing would be necessary, to talk with us and our post-surgical patients. 

We obtain great satisfaction when our patients breathe in clearly through their noses after surgery. They report more sound sleep, improved ability to exercise and overall improvement in the quality of their lives.