One of
nicest things about living in 21st century is amount of surgical options available to more people, including more and more people in developing world (though, obviously, not enough). Quite sincerely, countless numbers of lives have been outright saved, or inestimably improved, due to surgery. I doubt you’d find anyone who would absolutely conclude that surgery, as a concept, is a mistake; or that we should long for pre-surgery days, where infections and ailments so easily morphed into life-threatening conditions.
Are We Addicted to surgery?
Yet (and yes, there’s always a yet!), there is a bit of a cloud attached to this surgical silver lining. We now live in a world that is, for all intents and purposes, addicted to surgery. It has become first option – and in some cases, only option – that both doctors and patients consider when trying to remedy a problem.
Advances in medical technology have played a role here as well; transforming within span of a generation a surgery that once required 7-10 days of hospital care, to an “in by 2:00pm, out by 4:00pm” outpatient experience; and since many (enhanced) medical insurance plans cover many types of surgery – all it needs is a doctor’s okay – it’s not uncommon to come across people who have had a litany of surgeries over past few years. They might even know surgeons by name, and have a favorite parking spot at hospital.
It is in light of all this is that we look at snoring, and at surgery. In a nutshell: two don’t mix; and this is a bit of a problem to people who are persuaded by medical doctors (or by surgery-addicted colleagues, friends, and relatives) to go under knife to get rid of that “pesky snoring problem”. These people may be well intentioned, but they don’t have all of facts. One of things that they probably don’t (yet) know – again, not deliberately – is that surgery is not an exact science. It may look that way, especially when one sees army of hi-tech equipment that clogs many operating rooms and makes one think that they’re at NASA Mission Control instead of a local hospital.
However – and even surgeons will readily admit this (or their insurance companies will if they won’t) – surgery is, always has been, and always will be, somewhat exploratory. True, some surgeries are better known and more ordinary than others, and chance of a successful outcome for, say, a quick knee surgery might be radically more predictable than a kidney transplant. But bottom line is that both of these procedures are surgical, which means that they both have risks. This, indeed, is something of a wake-up call for people who have equated surgery with certainty.
So how does this relate to snoring? Quite bluntly, it’s this: whereas some surgeries are a bit more tried and tested than others, surgery designed to stop, mitigate, or treat snoring have been less than successful for many people. Why is this case? Surgery to treat snoring is designed, ultimately, to increase airflow in trachea; and most common surgical way to do this is to cut away some of tissue that is clogging up that passageway. Is this a wise choice? Possibly, yes, for some snorers this can be a remedy; but not for all, and certainly not for most. This is because problem of snoring is often much deeper than a constricted trachea.
Yes, as we discussed earlier in this book that is how snoring manifests itself as sound: air from lungs vibrates in airflow. Yet for many people, this is not ultimate cause of snoring; that cause, like many medical ailments, is often something of a mystery, and can change significantly from person to person.
Let’s look at something simple and non-medical: car insurance. Let’s take 20 people who are considered bad drivers by their insurance companies. As a result of that dubious distinction, all of these drivers are going to face a premium increase of $500 when they’re insurance is renewed. Now, seen at a distance, it might appear as though all of these drivers are in same boat (or same car, as it were). And given that assumption, a method to deal with this problem might be to simply give each of these people an extra $500 in cash. Really, as strange as that sounds, this is a way to solve this problem for each of these 20 drivers: they need to find $500 more to pay their insurance premium, and hence, that is what this so-called solution is going to do. Yet is this wise? No!
