About Surgery to Stop Blushing
If you’re wondering about surgery to stop blushing, it is probably because you suffer from erythrophobia, chronic blushing. Several conditions can lead to this kind of chronic blushing. In some cases, people have difficulty regulating their body temperature and this can lead to blushing. In other cases, hormonal changes—especially as women enter menopause—can cause chronic blushing. In the vast majority of cases, however, erythrophobia is psychological. That is, the person who suffers from it has some form of a social anxiety that makes them especially prone to public embarrassment and to getting the distinctive redness of blushing across their cheeks.
Having a surgery to stop blushing, however, should be a person’s last resort, and even then, most people should be advised to avoid it. Three quarters of people who undergo the surgery regret it afterwards. In many cases, the surgery will not cure the condition; while in others, the patient may develop other problems with the regulation of his or her body temperature.
The surgery itself is, in fact, an intentional destruction of the nerves at the periphery of the body. The theory behind the surgery is that by destroying the nerves, the body no longer overheats, causing the distinctive blush. Any time you are destroying nerves, you are incurring a set of risks and may actually make matters worse for the sufferer.
Furthermore, such surgeries tend to be an added expense because the procedure is rarely covered by insurance. This is because the effectiveness of surgery to stop blushing is in question. Furthermore, most doctors will not do this surgery because of its controversial nature. More often then not, patients will seek out this treatment in other countries, whose oversight of such procedures is much more lax than in the United States and in Europe.
So what is a person to do if they suffer from excessive blushing?
Determine the Cause
The first step that you need to take before you even starting considering whether or to have surgery to stop blushing, is to determine whether your blushing is psychological or physiological or if it is a mix of both. More often than not, it is a bit of a combination. Often if the condition is psychological, you will have had some form of it for quite a while. Although some event may have made it worse, typically you will already have displayed some of the signs of your social phobia.
If your condition is, in fact, physiological, you may have always experienced it, but more often than not, it occurred in relation to a hormonal change like menopause or as the result of a change in medication—as when a woman starts taking birth control pills, for example.
Alternative Cures
Several treatments short of surgery have a much better record when it comes to success in curing blushing. The key treatment for curing most cases of blushing is behavioral modification. Because a fear of social embarrassment is usually the cause of erythrophobia, one of the best ways of defeating it, is working with a psychologist trained in behavioral conditioning who can help you slowly become more comfortable with social situations so you do not trigger blushing.
Similarly, since chemicals in the body can also cause the condition, often the solution is to eliminate these chemicals. That means finding an alternative to the medication you recently started taking, or changing your diet.
Sometimes when it is a combination of both social anxiety and a propensity towards blushing in the first place, the treatment may involve a combination of therapy and medication to help you reduce anxiety.
In short, before you even consider having surgery to stop blushing, you should exhaust all the alternative treatments.