Bell’s Palsy – Treatment Options

Transcript

If Bell’s Palsy is ignored, it might resolve. Even if it’s not ignored, it might resolve, it might not. In general, if Bell’s Palsy continues and you have the facial paralysis on one side of the face or the other, the main issues that you’re dealing with: first and foremost is the issue of poor closure of the eye. If you can’t close the eye long-term, you have to always deal with maintaining moisture with eye drops, with ointment. The next move is to surgically try to correct it because we can’t regain that function very well around the sphincter of the eye (or the Obicularis.) People actually tend to put in a piece of gold – so we’d take a little bit of a gold weight and we put it into the upper eyelid and the gravity helps the eye close, whether it’s in the daytime or nighttime when you’re asleep. Other parts of the face are treated for more severe cases of Bell’s Palsy. If you’re in that moderate to severe range, then it becomes worth it to try to fix the other issues that you see with facial asymmetries. If you’re in the mild range, there are no good treatments except for Botox and fillers to try to make the face more symmetrical. The type of procedures I’m talking about – for the more severe ones are facial sling procedures or animation procedures, where we either reconnect nerve, we reconnect muscles, or we actually statically or stiffly go back and move the eyebrow to a higher position or the cheek to a higher position. Again, for mild situations of asymmetry, botox is the way to go because you can just use botulinum toxin on the opposite side of the face to weaken it, to match this side of the face, so facial asymmetry is not as much of a problem.