His and Her Health

Hi all! I have been lurking for quite a while and I really believe that I am a candidate for a vestibulectomy. I am seeing a pelvic pain specialist but she keeps refering me to PT which has done nothing. Any recommendations? I am in the bay area but willing to travel. I am so desperate to find someone that has done a lot of these.

thanks!!
<3 Steph

loverunning321, welcome to the boards. May I direct you to our search engine at the top of this page(right under Post a Poll.) Type in vestibulectomy. highlight All open Forums and click search button. It will bring up all the posts concerning that subject. I think it will help, however we do not recommend Drs on our bulletin board.

Thank you moderator. I have read most of the posts and have not found anything answering my question. I have emailed the NVA and ISSVD and have not heard back. I plan on contacting my local medical association on monday. I would love a recommendation from someone that has had success. I feel like this information is so hard to come by and it is the only thing stopping me from getting to talk to a specialist.

The NVA and ISSVD can give you names of physicians who say they treat vestibulitis but they do not verify the expertise of these physicians. Whereas there are many physicians in the country who perform the procedure, if my wife/daughter were to need one there are only a handful of physicians I would recommend. However, the policies of this website precludes me from giving names. My suggestion is to do a pubmed search for vestibulectomy and see what physicians have published studies of > 50 patients and who have a success rate > 90%.

I personally would not go to anyone who advocates "modified vestibuelctomy" over the complete procedure as I have had to perform many revisions on women to complete the surgery on women who had "modified" surgery.

Thank you Dr. Goldstein. I did as you suggested and searched pubmed. Most of the doctors were practicing on the east coast. I couldn't find any in California. Is there any other way to find a TRUE specialist in California? I am so discouraged.

thanks

You may want to contact Dr. Irwin Goldstein in San Diego at the San Diego Sexual Medicine clinic. My wife sees him.

thank you Orca! I will contact him!!!

I would go to the East Coast. They see the most patients with this problem and have the most experience and my friends have had good outcomes too.

Follow-up--a friend said that she did not have that great of an outcome in California and the East Coast is her preference.

<small>[ 12-17-2008, 10:34 PM: Message edited by: Moderator ]</small>

do you know who she saw in california? I am a college student so going to the East coast is very out of reach at the moment.

loverabbits321,have you tried contacting a major hospital in your area to ask their GYN department if they could give you the names of specialist in performing vestibulectomies? You might even want to look in the GYN section of the phone book and call several doctors to ask their speciality or if they know any one in your area that does many operations for vestibulitis.

Update- i contacted Irwin Goldstein in San Diego but he doesn't take insurance...which seems strange to me. My specialist at Stanford doesn't agree with vestibulectomies or estrogen/testosterone therapy. She sent me back to PT to have the muscles streched and elongated. Im also on Cymbalta for the pain. Any one else tried this?

loverabbits321...... Hi, I just wanted to say I had surgery for vestibulitis. I had a vestibulectomy about 2 years ago. After the surgery it was really painful. I did finally heal and the results were great I had my last child in October of 2008. In the past month I have started having all the symptoms again. So I quess its back. I am going to go back to my gyn really soon. I would say think really hard about having the surgery. I have had a total of 15 surgeries in my life and I am only 31 and the vestibulectomy was the MOST painful one of them all. I also have to say the past two years have been great without the pain but I am not sure I would have had the surgery if I could have known that it would come back. Good luck!

Vestibulectomy is an extremely effective surgery if done on the correct patient. As a very wise surgeon told me more than a dozen years ago, the success of surgery is determined even before walking into the operating room- patient selection is the key. IF done correctly, vestibulitis cannot come back after vestibulectomy-
i have done more than 300 vestibulectomies and have not had one recurrence of vestibulitis- I have had a few patients have a recurrence of pain temporarily because of pelvic floor dysfunction, but that doesn't mean that their vestibulitis returned.

loverunning -

You might try Altos Oaks Medical Group. They are in the bay area in california, in Mountain View. There are two doctors there that I know of who have performed the surgery before, well, atleast a modified vestibulectomy.