 Hi, I'm Dr. Mukundan Seshadri, lead consultant in cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at Manipal Hospital Whitefield in Bangalore. I thought I'd talk to you today about thoracic surgery. Now video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery has become a standard of treatment, a standard of care for patients needing thoracic surgery and we have been doing video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery or what we call as WATS, VATS for the last eight to nine years. Today I wanted to talk to you about a patient who we did three days ago. This patient had hyperhydrosis. In layman's terms, hyperhydrosis is excessive sweating of the hands and the feet. Now this is an extremely disturbing symptom for these patients and it is not uncommon. In fact, if you see the literature, almost 1% to 1.5% of people in the world have hyperhydrosis. Typically we have seen our friends and colleagues, some of them have excessive sweating, they pour sweat from their hands and their feet. This affects them in many ways. Another one, it causes a sense of a smell of body odor and they are not able to mix in society because of that. It also causes discomfort while they are writing exams. In fact, I had a student who could not write her exams at all because she has to pour sweat from her palms, especially on the right hand. So such people are eminently treatable by a condition called video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery and upper thoracic sympathectomy. This procedure is extremely simple and safe. It takes about an hour at the most and they get discharged in 2 days time. What we do is, we approach the thoracic sympathetic nerve. So that is a nerve which runs on the inside of the chest wall and hyperactivity of this nerve is being found to produce hyperhydrosis. So what we do is just resect a small portion or cut out a small portion of the sympathetic chain or a nerve which produces this hyperactivity through a very small incision in the side of the chest. So there will be 2 small incisions, sometimes 3 small cuts of 5 to 10 mm through which one we put the camera and through the other we use to cut this sympathetic nerve out. It has got no side effects at all and these patients remarkably recover. It restores their confidence, they do not have any body odor anymore, they do not have excess sweating in their hands, in their axilla and it completely changes their life. They get a lot of self-confidence and it allows them to get back to society, get back to their work and get back to their studies and perform much better and better. So I think this procedure is something which has not been popularized and many people are not a bit aware that all it takes is a one hour procedure and may be 1 to 2 days in hospital, 2 days at the most and they can get back to a normal life if they have the problem of hyperhidrosis or excessive sweating which can be solved. So if you know somebody who has got excessive sweating of their hands and their feet, they keep using their handkerchiefs to wipe their hands, you can definitely refer them for a video assisted thoracoscopic surgery which can change their lives. And I wanted to assure you that we here at Manipal Hospital Whitefield in Bangalore have the latest equipment available for such high end surgery for video assisted thoracoscopic surgery with excellent imaging systems and state of the art equipment which will help you get good results. Thank you.