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• n  surgical interruption of a nerve pathway in the sympathetic nervous system

• To check hypertension in some cases of nervous origin there is a formidable two-stage operation, sympathectomy: whole series of nerve bundles beside the spine are cut.
• For this purpose it is more effective than other drugs, and is a substitute for the surgical operation of sympathectomy.
• The operation, called an upper thoracic sympathectomy, is performed by making an incision in the side of the neck and removing those thoracic ganglia (nerve connections) that .