In this FAQ video, Dr. Tollestrup explains what he does clinically during peripheral nerve surgery.
Even though only a handful of surgeons worldwide are trained to perform peripheral nerve surgery to relieve pain, what happens during the operations is not complicated and can be broken into two distinctive categories. Here is Dr. T with more information.
Transcript: The techniques that I employ in the operating room can basically be boiled down to one of two things. It’s actually, at the macro level it’s kind of simple, you’re either decompressing a nerve, meaning you’re relieving the pressure on a nerve, or you’re typically disconnecting a nerve that has been damaged beyond repair to prevent that nerve from just sending a constant pain signal to the brain.
In most cases, nerves that need to be disconnected are small, purely sensory nerves so that that typically doesn’t result in loss of function of a limb. Almost always the only cases that you come across where you’re disconnecting or cutting big mixed motor sensory nerves like the sciatic nerve whatever, are patients who’ve already had an amputation and are dealing with phantom pain or pain in the stump, et cetera. So you’re just trimming the nerve back up higher than it was already cut.
