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Today I want to talk to you about balloon sinuplasty. What is balloon sinuplasty? No, we’re not filling up a balloon with helium and putting it up your nose. What we’re doing is we’re expanding the entranceway to the sinus. And the main sinuses that we do, we do in the office in terms of using the balloon. The way you get sinusitis is you get a narrowing or constriction in the sinus itself. Without doing any formal surgery, if we can get some air into the sinus, then we can allow it to breathe better. The way you get sinusitis is is that you have a lack of oxygen in the sinuses here and typically that’s due to our narrowed opening. The sinus gets a little bit swollen. You get a lack of oxygen – that’s a perfect medium for bacteria to grow – and then you require antibiotics.
Now in some patients, they get repeated infections. Subsequently, you go to your ear, nose and throat doctor – like myself – and we determine that you have in fact recurrent and repeated sinusitis. So then in the office, we pass a little catheter that we then expand – that’s the balloon part. When we expand it, it makes tiny little what we call micro-fractures. So now we’ve taken this little tiny opening. We’ve now expanded it by opening the balloon, right? We only leave it in there five seconds and we remove it. Now the sinus can aerate with the rest of the world, through the nose. Patients have virtually no pain, minimal amount of bleeding, and typically in those select patients, those patients who would benefit from it, they get almost immediate improvement. I think that’s something that you can check out, go see your ear, nose and throat doctor, and see if you’re a candidate for balloon sinuplasty.
