Needle aponeurotomy for the hand is all I see online. I am a Kaiser Permanente subscriber and even at that, I don't see anywhere online where needle aponeurotomy is performed on a penis…Got any suggestions? Do you know of any Urologist in my medical plan who does needle aponeurotomy for Peyronie?
Sincerely,
Martin Carroll, Jr.
Greetings Martin,
Well, you are certainly an adventurous person. Here you are a layperson and you are thinking outside the box about your Peyronie's treatment, but you are in a risky area. The problem is that this idea of using a needle to tear up the fibrous Peyronie's plaque without having to cut the penis shaft open has already been explored.
As you know, needle aponeurotomy is a type of surgery done on the palm of the hand to surgically reduce the cords that develop in Dupuytren's contracture. It is a less invasive hand surgery performed by inserting a needle under the skin of the palm, and then blindly slashing and tearing at the cords and contracted fascial tissue since the skin is never opened by the surgeon so he/she never actually sees the tissue that is being cut and torn. The purpose of this procedure is an attempt to weaken and reduce the cords that develop under the skin in Dupuytren contracture to the point that the surgeon can eventually break or snap the weakened Dupuytren cords. The recurrence rate of the Dupuytren nodules and cords returning after needle aponeurotomy is fairly high, about a year or two faster than conventional hand surgery. Even though they return after this kind of hand surgery, the real caution and reason many people do not get this surgery is that when the Dupuytrens comes back in that year or two it will come back worse than the first time around. This is common for many of these Dupuytren hand surgeries and a good reason to think long and hard about getting started with the first one.
There are many hand surgeons who are proponents of this technique, and others who are not. No surgical technique is perfect, and they all carry risks. You might want to read more about these drawbacks and apply that thinking to what might happen if that same kind of technique was done for Peyronie's disease.
This same technique in which the tip of a large gauge needle is used as a cutting tool to reduce the Peyronie's plaque while the actual slashing and tearing of the tissue is not directly observed by the doctor who is doing the penis surgery is called the Leriche technique for Peyronie's disease. But it is not called an aponeurotomy because there is no aponeurosis in the shaft of the penis; that is why you were not able to find any information using the terms you were searching. If this surgery for the penis was to be named in a way similar to what is being done in the hand, it might a name like Needle Tunicotomy. This term would be applicable because it is the tunica albuginea of the penis that would be surgically cut by the needle tip and left in place, just as it is the aponeurosis of the palm that is cut with the needle in Dupuytren's contracture. You will not find this term anywhere but here because I coined it. to read more about this procedure, click on “Leriche technique for Peyronie's surgery.”
There are many more conservative ways of trying to correct your Peyronie's disease than having the internal scar blindly being cut to shreds. I suggest you consider avoiding that kind of risk and look at some of the less risky non-invasive Alternative Medicine options that are on the PDI website. TRH