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Correlation between social fobias anxiety and ETS

Some patients affected with excessive hand sweating also showed signs of anxiety and social phobias. The combination of excessive sweating and those clinical manifestations were believed to be due to excessive sympathetic discharge. We know that patients that suffer from hyperhidrosis can experience heart palpitations and inability and cope in certain social situations. This led some of the ETS surgeons around the world, mainly in Europe, to offer sympathectomy to patients who suffer only from social phobias and anxieties. Some of their work was presented in several international meetings but obviously those findings promoted a healthy discussion about the validity and the success of those treatment modalities to cure them.

In the U.S. and Canada most of the surgeons who perform ETS did not adopt these approaches as suggested by their European counterparts. Dr. Reisfeld himself feels that because of the uncertainty of those presentations he does not recommend patients to undergoe ETS when their only clinical manifestations are those of social phobia or anxiety.

ETS does have a beta blocking affect, and by such it does give some relief to patients who suffer from excessive hand sweating and palpitations (heart). Again here Dr. Reisfeld does not believe in performing the operation unless the patient has excessive sweating together with the palpitations.

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