From what I read, surgery can be successful in treating neurogenic TOS (I think physical therapy is tried first), but not always at as high a success rate as the surgery for vascular TOS, which is at least 90-95%. Nerves are really tricky and sometimes once they're damaged, it's permanent. It's really pretty straightforward--for the vascular surgery, part or all of the rib is removed, thereby increasing the space for the arteries and veins and removing the compression. Yes, there are occasional instances where a surgery may not work and have to be repeated (just like any other type of surgery), and maybe this occurs a bit more often when artery/vein repair is involved. I may be mistaken, but it really sounds to me as if he is confusing the surgery to treat neurogenic TOS with the surgery to treat vascular TOS. So I'm confused--is his solution just to do nothing at all, wait around, and not even look into surgery? What is his plan of attack, so to speak? As for the venogram and arteriogram, yes, I'm pretty sure there is radiation involved, but I would think a small amount (your doctor would have to confirm that). The whiplash happened to me almost 6 months ago, and I've felt deathly ill since then. I haven't been diagnosed with neurogenic TOS (yet), so before the surgery my surgeon is having me see "his" neurologist for nerve studies, etc. to see if I do (this will be my 3rd neurologist). Since this happened I've had awful migraines, nausea, constant dizziness, memory problems, vision/reading problems, etc. This could be due to some tiny brain bleed or brain lesion or something like that from the whiplash and not from neurogenic TOS, although the brain MRIs I've had done were normal. You can have only neurogenic, only arterial, only venous TOS, or a combination of them.