What surgical instruments are used in FESS?
This question is asked frequently, perhaps out of curiosity (or fear!). Endoscopic sinus instruments are necessarily long and thin, with very fine tips designed to gently tease away tissues or bony partitions separating the sinus structures from one another or from diseased tissue. While “drills” are almost never used in sinus surgery, newer techniques involve the use of technology borrowed from orthopedic surgery, where very precise tissue shavers, which do indeed resemble drills, are used to perform a similar function to conventional sinus instruments. The tips of the tissue shavers are very small and delicate enough to easily work within the tiny confines of the sinus passages, removing diseased tissues and precisely opening narrow sinus passages. Other instruments include balloon catheters (Balloon Sinuplasty) and Coblation instruments (see below). Importantly, no one technique is necessarily better than another; the skilled sinus surgeon will use techniques with which he or she is
