Stop Sweaty Palms

If you are suffering from sweaty palms or palmar hyperhydrosis, you are not alone. About 1 percent or 3 million Americans are your fellow suffers of excessive hand sweat. As I too used to have sweaty palms, I fully understand how distressing and embarrassing this condition can be especially when engaging in social and professional activities. I could still remember when a simple handshake was a nightmare became such great an embarrassment to the other party and I even had friends who were turned away from becoming surgeons due to their severe sweaty palms. These are the sad facts of life we have to contend with. But after reading this article, I hope you can find your very own liberation to stop sweaty hands, just like I did.

I started researching about palmar hyperhidrosis since I turned twenty, which was many years ago. Back then, there were limited types of treatment available. There were AICI creams, deodorant, ETS surgery and iontophoresis. Botox was not even popularized as treatment to stop sweaty hands yet.

As I had severe excessive hand sweat, my doctor suggested ETS surgery, medically known as Endoscopic Thoracic Sympathectomy which means severing or clipping the affected seat glands, thereby stopping the sweating. There are inherent surgical risks in that my lungs need to be collapsed for the surgeon to reach the affected sweat glands. The good doctor did not forget to inform me that I would highly like be developing compensatory sweating on some parts of my body like torso, face, feet, underarms or groin 95% of the time. There are more ways than one to stop sweaty palms, but if you drip sweat like I do on both my palms, you too would probably be inclined to go for ETS surgery which did seemed like a viable solution and taking a bet on being that 5% who do not develop compensatory sweating. I went ahead for my surgery in attempt to get rid of palmar hyperhidrosis.

The first two weeks were total bliss as I had never felt such dry palms, in fact I felt totally eclectic thinking that I had stop sweaty hands for good. But compensatory sweaty crept in and I suddenly felt my back wet with sweat for no reason. Then my feet sweat up whenever I wore socks and shoes. The weirdest phenomenon is that whenever I taste sourish foods, my face would break into cold sweat. Such are the lights of compensatory sweating and now I had an entirely new set of sweat problems to contend with. And as if it were not bad enough, the surgeon did not do a clean job at burning all the sweat glands for my right palm and it still drip sweat.

It took me many long years to get used to the compensatory sweating by tightly managing my own personal hygiene regime. I had to ensure that I am sufficiently cooled to a sweatless state and keep ventilation to the maximum, keep barefooted as much as possible and steer away from sourish foods as much as I crave for them.

This was the life I led until I found out about iontophoresis, which essentially is hooking up a device, soaking your hands and feet into it to and let the machines do the work for about 20 minutes for every session daily over one week period. I did the routine and surprisingly enough, my sweaty palms are gone. I am in the process of trying the routine on my feet and am seeing continuous success.

As I am a rather private person, I prefer to conduct the routine in the comfort and privacy of my own home at my own time, so I set up my own iontophoresis device which functions just as well as the ones at the clinics.

The lesson learnt is that I should have gone for the non surgical, non invasive and proven effective treatment of iontophoresis first as treatment to stop sweaty hands, before committing to non reversible, surgical procedures. Lucky for me, I now have reborn dry palms, after many lost years.