Can constant pressure flatten a bump on your nose?

Answer 1

This is an insightful question given that the inquirer may be familiar with medical and dental conditions involving deformities of bone and cartilage which are successfully treated with techniques for reshaping structures with applied physical pressure. Specifically, most people are very familiar with orthodontic and orthopedic procedures for realigning malpositioned teeth with braces and correcting congenital limb deformities with bracing, plating or orthotic devices.

"Bumps" or humps on the top of any particular nose may develop during normal nasal growth or as the result of nasal trauma. The common dorsal nasal hump deformity, typically of cosmetic concern to patients is a result of normal nasal growth and may often be normally observed with greater frequency among some ethnic groupings.

The approach of reshaping a nasal deformity through an applied constant pressure approach meets several physical and social considerations that have overwhelmingly to-date precluded its use over conventional surgical methods (rhinoplasty). In order to reshape any bone or cartilage, the pressure, or tension, must be anchored to a more stable skeletal point, which in the face, would require surgery to place a forceful bracing device across the nose, under the skin, to anchor in the maxillary bone or cheek bone. Such bracing would require extensive facial surgical dissection of the tissues of the face, even if performed from beneath the upper cheeks and nose as approached from within the mouth. If bracing were placed above the skin, the pressure wound exceed the pressure of the blood supply to the skin and erode the skin down to the underlying exposed cartilage and bone, leading to an obvious deformity in and of itself. Either of these approaches wound be cosmetically unacceptable and would require months or years of application. Alternatively, conventional rhinoplasty, any surgery to reshape the nose, requires only an hour or two to complete, given today's very safe provision of general anesthesia, in order to accomplish a very consistent desirable result.

The reason for constant pressure techniques not being currently applied for the correction of nasal hump deformities are that more direct, safe and effective techniques are available in the care of experienced surgeons.