There's a "new" method (known for around 10 years now) called "pneumatic balloon dilatation for chronic anal fissure" which promises healing rates of over 90%.

Does anyone have experience with this method? How was the healing afterwards?

This method sounded really promising in the research paper, but I don't know if anyone does this in the US, except maybe the Cleveland Clinic. There was a post on here long ago about it.

hmm I see. I checked some Swiss hospital websites and it seems like it's the option of choice right now since the success rate (apparently) is quite high (and no risky surgery needed). I'm gonna ask my doctor about it next time I'm in the hospital.

Could you please direct me to some of these Swiss websites which are using this technique? I would really like to take a look at them. Almost all the medical literature I've read so far claim LIS surgery is the best way for healing fissures. New and improved techniques of dilatation are not considered useful. Doctors claim that this is because the effect on the internal and external sphincter is unpredictable under dilatation. But if the Swiss hospitals have begun using it then surely there must be benefits of it.

Also see posts by this user on his experience of pneumatic dilatation search.php?author_id=1429&sr=posts

Thanks for the link for the posts by BGAN, I'm getting hopeful after reading his success story! I think PBD is my next choice in case the healing doesn't happen until next month.

Here you have a link to Hirslanden Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland about fissure treatments:
https://www.hirslanden.ch/content/globa ... S10-12.pdf

Sorry, but the text is in German. But you can easily copy the text to Google Translate to get it in English.

They write there that they do LIS nowadays only in very rare cases and generally is not recommended.

They also mention Gonyautoxine
there. Apparently it has a healing rate of astonishing 100% (according to one study).

I currently seem to be slowly healing. So I will give it another month or so and in case I still have my fissure I probably will make an appointment at Hirslanden hospital since they seem to have a lot of experience with treating chronic fissures.

Thanks for the link! The gonyanotoxin (sp?) method was described in one research paper but nothing more has been developed using it. Probably they ran out of funding or discovered some bad side effects of the toxin.

I personally would definitely go for PBD if it came to that. I'm not a good candidate for surgery and I'm looking into getting more information from the Cleveland Clinic about this. It seems very strange to me how doctors in the US are so happy to cut, but don't want to explore better methods for patients. I wonder if it all comes down to malpractice risk in the end.

Good luck with your healing!