This is the variable that moves your total more than any other, and it is the one people are least prepared for. A course is usually not one appointment, and the reason is mechanical rather than commercial.
A banding session generally deals with one hemorrhoid column at a time. Most people arriving here with symptoms have more than one column involved, and that is the entire reason a course commonly runs to two or three appointments rather than being finished off in a single sitting.
That is a mechanical constraint rather than a commercial one, and the distinction matters because from the outside the structure looks identical to a clinic quietly stretching things out. The test is whether the count was estimated from an examination and told to you before you committed to anything.
Which is what happens here: the anoscopy shows how many columns are involved, and that number becomes the estimate. Banding explains the procedure itself, the examination explains where the count comes from, and what treatment costs explains what it does to the total.
Montreal sessions
The estimate
How your Montreal session count is set
Columns counted
The anoscopy shows how many columns are involved. That count is the starting point for everything else.
Grade factored in
The grade affects whether banding is the right tool at all, and sometimes how much a single session achieves.
An estimate, said out loud
You are given a number before committing, framed as an estimate rather than as a promise.
Revised if it changes
If the response is different from expected, you hear the revised count then rather than at the final visit.
The gap between visits
Why no interval appears on this page
There is a specific thing missing here and it is missing deliberately. The published sources do not agree on how long to leave between banding sessions. One describes four to eight weeks between treatments. Another describes up to three sessions at two-week intervals.
Both of those are legitimate published sources, and they sit a factor of four apart from each other. Picking one and printing it as the interval would mean choosing whichever suited the page, and anyone who then planned their time off work around it would have been misled by a number we invented.
So yours is set at your own visit, from your response and the clinician’s judgement. What the evidence says covers where the published sources do and do not agree, aftercare covers what happens between appointments, and the recovery timeline covers the days after each one.
One columnTreated per session
1 to 3 visitsTypical course
NoneInterval published here
Related
What the session count affects in Montreal
The procedure behind the count, where the estimate comes from, and what the number does to your total.
What people ask when they find out this is not a single appointment and want to know why.
Because a session generally treats one hemorrhoid column, and most people have more than one involved. The structure is a mechanical constraint on the procedure rather than a way of spreading the billing.
Commonly two or three, but yours comes from the examination rather than from this page. The anoscopy shows how many columns are involved, and that count becomes the estimate.
Set at your visit. The published sources disagree by a factor of four on this, one giving four to eight weeks and another two-week intervals, so printing a figure here would mislead you.
Fair question. The test is whether the count was estimated from an examination and told to you before you committed, and whether the quote covers the course rather than each visit separately.
Then you hear the revised number at the point it changes rather than at the final appointment, and the reason it changed. An estimate that moves silently is the thing to object to.
It can. The grade decides whether banding is the right tool at all, and sometimes how much a single session achieves, so it feeds into the estimate alongside the column count.
Session count
Why a course is not one appointment
One column per session
That is the mechanical constraint. Most people have more than one involved, so a course runs to two or three.
Counted, then quoted
The anoscopy shows how many columns are involved, and the estimate follows from that rather than from a template.
No interval printed
Published sources differ by a factor of four on the gap between sessions, so none is stated here.
Revised out loud
If the expected count changes, you hear it at that point rather than discovering it at the last visit.
