WHY SNORING SURGERY
CAN BE A BAD IDEA

Snoring Surgery is not Always Successful

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 the case? Surgery to treat snoring is designed, ultimately, to increase the airflow in the trachea; and the most common surgical way to do this is to cut away some of the 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 the problem of snoring is often much deeper than a constricted trachea.

Yes, as we discussed earlier in this guide that is how snoring manifests itself as sound: air from the lungs vibrates in the airflow.

Yet for many people, this is not the ultimate cause of snoring; that cause, like many medical ailments, is often something of a mystery, and can change significantly from person to person.

The example on the following page will help shed some light on this potentially complex point.

An Example: From Snoring to Insurance

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 the 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!

Some of those drivers – probably more than a few of them – are not going to actually correct why they might be classified as a “bad driver” by their insurance company. They simply won’t know why they’re bad drivers, and hence, some of them will likely remain a “bad driver”, and face higher insurance premiums next year – but this time after a few more accidents or tickets.

As you can easily see, the real cause of the so-called “bad driving” isn’t solved when each person is given a nice gift of $500 with which to pay his or her increased insurance premium. And since the problem isn’t really solved, the bad driving can crop up again, and cause financial problems and even worse, it can endanger health and safety.

So when people readily turn to trachea tissue-cutting surgery to cure their snoring, they may quite easily be overlooking the real root cause of the snoring; something that may be related to diet, sleep position, jaw or tongue dysfunction, lifestyle, genetics, or be an indication of an even more serious health problem; an indication that could be dangerously suppressed (temporarily, at least), after a seemingly successful surgery.

Going to surgery as an easy, off-the cuff solution for snoring, is like giving these bad drivers $500 in cash. It may seem to solve their problem, but for many, it will just be a temporary fix; masking even deeper problems that can lead to severe consequences down the road, including Sleep Apnea.

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