Patient Success Stories: Essential Tremor Patients and Focused Ultrasound

For people with essential tremor, the activities of daily life can be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Essential tremor, a medical movement disorder, causes people's arms, hands, and heads to shake uncontrollably, and no matter how hard people try, the tremor cannot be willed to stop.

Increasingly, essential tremor patients are turning to a noninvasive and painless new treatment—focused ultrasound—that has the potential to eliminate their trembling. For several years, Columbia neurosurgeon Gordon Baltuch, MD, PhD, who specializes in the surgical treatment of movement disorders, has been one of a few surgeons in the United States experienced in the technique.