&gt; You can&#x27;t draw firm conclusions by something someone said once.<p>The only people in this thread who are drawing firm conclusions are the ones expressing the firm conclusion that Empty Nose Syndrome is 100% attributable to anxiety.<p>I certainly don&#x27;t claim to know what is going on.  But I am not at all convinced by the people who are confidently dismissing the possibility of any other causes.<p>&gt; So what? That&#x27;s just something that was in the article. Who knows what really happened.<p>Even if I grant you that he might have unknowingly remembered that his surgery included turbinate reduction, that doesn&#x27;t matter unless he knew about Empty Nose Syndrome before he experienced the symptoms.<p>&gt; Now can I check with you whether you read what you wrote? Because it didn&#x27;t make any sense at all. How can anyone who hasn&#x27;t had turbinate reduction think they have a condition that is caused by turbinate reduction? That does not compute.<p>Here is why it computes.  Empty Nose Syndrome, as described from various sources, has a common set of symptoms and is linked to one specific surgical procedure.  Now let us suppose your theory is correct and it is caused solely by anxiety focused on the surgical intervention.  If that were the case, you would expect many people to express this same set of symptoms from other nose-related surgeries.  You would expect that the description of Empty Nose Syndrome would then expand to be linked to a number of different nasal surgeries.  After all, if these patients are hypochondriacs whose anxiety causes physical discomfort, why would this anxiety be limited to only turbinate reduction?<p>Now maybe your theory is that awareness of the syndrome itself creates the power of suggestion that causes the patient to feel these symptoms.  And without that and the intellectual link to turbinate reduction, they will not experience the symptoms.  Now that theory is completely contrary to the story given in the article.  But besides that, how under your theory did the syndrome begin?  If it takes the power of suggestion to create the sensation, how did the first people experience it?<p>Anything that created this syndrome out of thin air for turbinate reduction should be able to create it out of thin air for other nose surgeries.  And yet for 15 years it has continued to be linked specifically to turbinate reduction.  Why?