What Makes Your Nose Stuffy?

Hey, I'm Dr. Manan Shah, I'm here to talk about inferior turbinate hypertrophy. So let's talk about what makes your nose stuffy, periodically, anatomically. So inside your nose, there are these structures called your turbinates. They come from the outside of the nose and they hang in, and you can see them here sort of pointing in from the nose. So, when you breathe, those turbinates are there to help your nose warm the air. But sometimes those turbinates get hypertrophied, meaning they get bigger due to things like allergies or environmental irritants. And when they get bigger, there's less airflow.

So how do we treat this? Well, the first thing we can always do is treat your allergies. We can use over-the-counter antihistamines. We can use immunotherapy like allergy drops or allergy tablets to decrease them and prevent the cause. But from a surgical perspective, what we'll sometimes do is we'll sometimes actually go into your nose with the camera and we'll put a little device inside the turbinate and shrink the turbinates down. By doing that, you're literally just creating more space inside the nose.