Excessive Foot Sweating

Excessive Foot Sweating

Excessive foot sweating can be as severe as severe hand sweating. It can appear as isolated foot sweating (Plantar Hyperhidrosis) or associated with excessive hand sweating. As a matter of fact most cases of excessive foot sweating come together with excessive hand sweating. Conservative treatment should always be attempted to control it, but the success rate for the conservative measures is not as good in those cases of excessive foot sweating. Endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy when it is done for excessive hand sweating can help in no more than 30-50% of the cases. Until recently a separate lumbar sympathectomy for the treatment of excessive foot sweating was not offered. Over the last 2 to 3 years lumbar sympathectomy has been offered to patients with severe excessive foot sweating. So far the majority of the cases were done only on female patients due to the fear that when doing lumbar sympathectomy on males one can cause retrograde ejaculation. Recent clinical work that was done in austria showed that performing lumbar sympathectomy in male patients below the level of L2 will not cause retrograde ejaculation. Since this information so far is coming from one clinical study any male patient should discuss this issue thoroughly with his or her surgeon.

The operation can be done endoscopically assisted and can take about two hours. Patients will most likely spend the first night at the hospital. The success rate is about 90% and the side effects such as pain, discomfort and scarring and well tolerated by the patients. More clinical information and follow-up will be needed to see whether the retrograde ejaculation for the male population is a real problem.

In some cases where endoscopically assisted lumbar sympathectomy can not be done due to certain technical difficulties it can be converted to an open lumbar sympathectomy which involves two small cuts about 2 inches in size in either flank and the operation can be accomplished through that method. It does not prolong necessarily the time that the patient has to stay at the hospital and the pain involved can be well tolerated.

Dr. Reisfeld is one of the first surgeons to offer this new approach to solve the problem of severe excessive foot sweating (Plantar Hyperhidrosis). Learn more about this procedure which is called lumbar sympathectomy.