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Patients very commonly come to me as a first time patient, worried that I’m gonna recommend surgery on the first visit. And that’s a very rare circumstance where there really are no other options. The vast majority of my patients, we start with routine medications, physical therapy, and take a slow progression towards more and more aggressive approaches if they need it.

The next step after therapy is typically injections. And then after they’ve tried everything else, if they’re not getting better and the pain’s bad enough and they have a good surgical option, then we go over their surgical options.

Spondylolisthesis just being slippage, and that’s where in the spine, one bone is slipped on the other one vertebrae. So on one end it may just be something we see on X-ray that’s not really causing any problems. On the other end, if it’s very unstable, moving a lot, it could be something that requires timely surgical intervention.

Physical therapy is something I very commonly employ in my patients, both before surgery and after surgery. The goal before surgery is of course, to get them better without them needing surgery. The goal after surgery is to help them recover.

I use lasers very typically in spinal surgery, usually to help minimize the soft tissue involvement when I’m doing microdiscectomy. To be more specific when patients have a disc pressing on the nerve, I use the laser to relieve that pressure very precisely by melting away the disc with the laser and it’s much less tissue dissection and I think makes for a better outcome and better recovery.

Much of the surgery that I perform would be considered minor surgery where patients go home the same day. The important thing to, to remember for my patients is for them to know that I know to them no surgery is minor. Every surgery is a big deal, even though we may consider it minor as a procedure, all surgery is major to the patient.