I’ll share what a good surgeon whom I won’t name told me about the causes of stiffness. See his words below,
“ Numbness after genioplasty is most frequently due to partial or complete damage to the mental nerve. Stiffness and frozen“ feeling is related to the amount of degloving of the muscles and soft tissue from the underlying bone that needs to be reattached afterwards and can lead to scarring. Both issues should be avoidable in experienced hands, but healing problems can also occur after any operation and in any patient.”
On whether it can be treated:
“Unfortunately Nerve lesion is almost impossible to be treated satisfactorily. Scarring can sometimes be released a bit, but never completely. The best thing is avoiding it from the very beginninG.”
Also, according to him, the surgeons that say numbness is the cause “know that that’s not the case but just do not want to admit it.”
For those who insist that “stiffness is a byproduct of numbness” please point me to the literature that supports this. I don’t think you’ll find anything that says the nerves do anything more than merely supply sensation. “Stiffness” is not a sensation, it’s not something you can determine with a pin prick. It’s something you observe in motion, e.g. stiff joints, stiff muscles, etc.
Take that FWIW. Seems right to me. There are too many people with numbness who don’t have stiffness for this to be the same problem. It’s not.
This problem mostly cannot be treated, however there are surgeons out there who see patients for “stiffness after genioplasty” and claim to have offered them great relief.
